


in deep with you darling

by t_fic (topaz), topaz, topaz119 (topaz)



Series: fall in with you [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Female Friendship, First Kiss, First Meetings, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Male-Female Friendship, Mind Control Aftermath & Recovery, POV Female Character, Post-Movie(s), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Slow Build, Where Was Clint Barton During Captain America 2?, not quite Age of Ultron compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-25
Updated: 2016-03-05
Packaged: 2018-02-14 14:31:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 48,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2195331
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/topaz/pseuds/t_fic, https://archiveofourown.org/users/topaz/pseuds/topaz, https://archiveofourown.org/users/topaz/pseuds/topaz119
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Darcy could have, under normal circumstances, resisted the aesthetics (however awesome they are, and holy <i>crap</i> are they awesome), but there's an itch under her skin—apparently, nearly dying by giant, fire-breathing robots from space in the middle of Nowhere, New Mexico will start you questioning your life choices. Who knew?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Puente Antiguo

**Author's Note:**

> I've been wanting to write a canon-compliant Darcy/Clint (as opposed to _you need a rock not a rolling stone_ , where I was writing before anything but _Thor_ ) and I figured I'd better get going before Joss does whatever he's gonna do in _Age of Ultron_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Right now, we're just playing with canon from _Thor_ , so spoilers for that (including the post-credits scene and what that all means.) I'm also having lots of fun with the pertinent bits and pieces from the tie-in comic _Fury's Big Week_.

Darcy generally isn't the type to pick up strangers in bars, but she feels the extenuating circumstances of the day (i.e., _a)_ the entire Norse pantheon apparently being alive and well and living in space; _b)_ said pantheon having access to giant, killer, fire-breathing robots; and, _c)_ _really_ being into settling their differences with armed combat) combined with the fact that the guy she is currently contemplating leaving with isn't exactly a stranger (i.e., _a)_ he spent the entire day working next to or near Darcy to clean up after the previously mentioned giant, killer, fire-breathing robots from space; _b)_ he is apparently on not just speaking, but snarking terms with the head honcho of the Men in Black, which at least means he has a job, and one that he probably is pretty good at because Darcy has a feeling Coulson wouldn't put up with shit like that otherwise; and _c)_ they've already been introduced by the Head MIB himself, so technically, he is not a stranger but more a friend of a friend (if you stretch the meaning of 'friend' to include government agents interested in your boss's life's-work, which Darcy is willing to do this evening).)

The way said not-quite-stranger fills out his cargo pants and t-shirt isn't hurting, either.

But, yeah, no, Darcy assures herself. She could have, under normal circumstances, resisted the aesthetics (however awesome they are, and holy _crap_ are they awesome), but there's an itch under her skin—apparently, nearly dying by giant, fire-breathing robots from space in the middle of Nowhere, New Mexico will start you questioning your life choices. Who knew?

Also, she reassures herself, she still has standards. She has a very short list (of one) for which she's considering breaking her long-standing rule, and, as previously mentioned, Agent Clint Barton, Codename Hawkeye, does have at least a fair amount going for him. She could just be rationalizing things (she's kinda good at that), but when she leans in close and asks if he wants to get out of there, he doesn't jump all over her, only tilts his head and looks at her with a smile in his eyes. "Not that I'm saying I'm not interested," he tells her, "but it's been kind of a crazy day. You sure this isn't just a reaction to all of that?"

"Oh, hell, yes, it's a reaction to the day," Darcy says, and she likes him even more when he laughs. "Dude. Giant, fire-breathing robots from space." She arches an eyebrow at him and grins when he shrugs in a whattaya-gonna-do way. "I am definitely in a not-normal head-space right now, but I'm also way less not-normal than I would have thought, given all the weirdness."

Barton blinks a couple of times while he's clearly trying to figure out how to parse what she just said. He gets extra points for not calling her crazy and just saying, "You know I work for the 'jack-booted thugs', right?"

"Yeah," Darcy sighs. "I do know. It's the major point against you, but you've been down here on the ground working your ass off with all of us regular people all day. That counts for a lot, even before I add in karma points for how every dog in town managed to work the sad-puppy-eyes and get treats from you. I like guys who like dogs. Plus, I also heard you bitching out the rest of the Men-In-Black, and the sense of humor kinda does it for me."

"You mind if I share that with the suits?" Even if Darcy hadn't already decided Barton was in the Yes column, the way his eyes light up when he really smiles would have catapulted him over any and all competition. "They don't agree."

"I will agree that Suits are generally idiots," Darcy says, shrugging. "But…" She waggles her beer glass thoughtfully."As much as this pains me to admit, I kinda think Coulson not only has a sense of humor under that whole G-Man-Robot façade, but I'm pretty sure he uses you to troll everyone else." It really does almost cause her physical pain, because she is still hella pissed at Coulson's high-handed tactics, but he's been down on the ground, too, coordinating with the people who got their lives flattened and sending his bully boys off to help out all over. Plus, Darcy hadn't been too annoyed to notice how the ones who complained generally ended up doing things like hanging upside down out of second story windows getting harassed for not working fast enough _or_ how often the guy in front of her had been the one to be harassing the jerk in question. "Look," she adds. "I'm going to go now and you're cordially invited to come along with me." She waves to Tommy behind the bar and starts searching through her pockets for some cash. "I'm kinda amped up, as you noted, but I'm in full possession of my faculties and most of them are all for blowing off a little steam and celebrating that I'm still alive. You're cordially invited along for that, too."

"Well, now." His mouth quirks up in a smile that does more completely unfair things to Darcy's insides, but he adds a twenty to the one she's shoved at Tommy, so there's at least a chance he can make good on all that it promises. "Can't be turning down the best offer I've had in forever," he says. His hand settles low on Darcy's back and he threads them through the bar, steering Darcy around everyone who's doing their level best to forget all the crazy shit that had happened that day by being even crazier.

His hand is big and warm on her back, even through all the layers she's wearing in deference to the desert night chill, and his touch is light. Darcy is not letting herself think about _any_ of that until they're someplace a little more private. More power to anyone who gets off on exhibitionism, but it's not her thing. They skirt the dance floor (which has sort of spilled out into the rest of the tables, and yeesh, even _onto_ the tables in a couple of semi-tasteless incidences) and dodge a shoving match that's about to start throwing punches, and get to the door without further complications.

There's a bite to the wind coming down from the mountains; after the stuffy, overheated bar, Darcy can't help shivering at the first touch of it on her skin. Barton moves closer, which hell, yes, Darcy is all for, but before anything can really get started, a shadow detaches itself from one of the MIB cars and resolves into Coulson. "Agent Barton. Ms. Lewis."

"Boss-man," Barton answers. He doesn't look surprised or embarrassed or anything, and Darcy is kinda happy to notice that he doesn't step away from her either. He just looks over her head to where Coulson is standing, like it's not actually his boss he's talking to, more like a friend. "Looking for me?"

"Yes," Coulson says, holding out a cell phone. "Talk your partner down before she ends up putting a certain genius former-weapons-manufacturer in traction and causing me untold reams of paperwork."

Barton does step away at that, taking the phone and saying, "Wait, you want _me_ to be the voice of reason? Are you sure that Destroyer didn't drop something on your head or anything?" He's already punching numbers into the phone, though, and Darcy is seeing her night unravel before her eyes. She spins around and glares at Coulson.

"It wasn't enough that you stole my iPod, now you're cock-blocking me, too?"

Coulson looks ever-so-slightly pained and there's a choking noise coming from Barton's direction. Darcy counts both as wins, but the fact remains that the guy with the nice eyes and even nicer arms is not next to her anymore. She crosses her arms and ups her glare at Coulson.

"Sorry to, ah, interrupt," Coulson says, and for a wonder, he actually sounds sincere. He rubs hard at base of his neck in the universal sign of impending migraine. Darcy is not mollified, though. Yes, he's had a craptastic day, too, but hey, handling crazy shit--that's why they pay him the big bucks. Darcy does not remotely get paid the big bucks (or anything, really) and she'd been looking forward to a little fringe benefit to make up for that. "I was looking for you, as well. Dr. Foster isn't answering her phone; I was hoping you might be able to check on her."

"Why?" Darcy demands. "So you can clean out her trailer, too, just in case you missed something at the lab?"

"Ms. Lewis," Coulson says. "Please understand that Dr. Foster is quite possibly the only person on this planet who can identify the possibility of incoming, extraterrestrial dangers. Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing whether those dangers are also cognizant of this fact and, if so, might choose to target her in an attempt to mitigate the advantage she presents for us."

As much as Darcy wants to dismiss him, he probably does have a point. She doesn't have to like it, though. 

"Fine," she mutters, digging through her messenger bag for the keys to the trailer. One thing about Puente Antiguo is that it's so freaking small it's only going to take her two minutes to walk over and make sure Jane's just heads down in her notebooks cross-referencing all the observations she made in between the moments of heart-stopping terror during the day. Bless her heart, it's the only way she knows to blow off steam. Darcy had shoved a fried egg sandwich and a bowl of grapes at her before she'd left to begin her own steam-blowing-off process; Jane could crunch numbers all night on that much nutrition.

Coulson follows Darcy, and Barton tags along behind him. From how hard Barton's laughing, Darcy's not sure he's talking anyone out of anything--egging them seems like a much more likely option--but Coulson doesn't seem bothered by it. They all straggle around the back of the old filling station/lab and Darcy fights with the glitchy lock on the trailer's front door. When she finally gets the stupid thing open, all the lights are on inside, but there's no Jane, only Erik snoring from where he's sprawled out on the fold-down bed in the living area. 

This wouldn't normally be a big deal. Jane has a tendency to flip her schedule and work through the night--except that there still isn't any equipment in the lab and it'd been pitch black when they'd just walked past. And her phone is sitting out on the counter.

"I'm sure there's a perfectly reasonable explanation," Coulson says. Darcy still blames him and his need-to-check-in-for-possibly-scary-reasons for the sudden uptick in her pulse as she considers where else Jane might be. It also doesn't really help when her pick for a night of fun ends his call with a "Gotta run, Nat. Coulson's eyebrow is twitching and you know he only saves that for the weird shit," and does some kind of a subtle shift where he ends up less the distractingly good-looking guy who'd been throwing darts blindfolded at the bar and more the who-do-you-want-me-to-take-out professional badass. 

"Okay," Darcy says, pleasantly surprised when her voice sounds steady and calm. "There are a couple of places I can think of…"

She heads back out the door, her little entourage of men in black trailing behind her as she considers her options. Really, there's only one place that's likely, because Jane ate before Darcy left, so the chance of her going to the diner is pretty low. If Jane isn't where Darcy's thinking… _Stop it_ , Darcy scolds herself. _Just stop._ She manages not to run, but she's definitely walking quickly as she crosses over to the back door of the old building that had housed their lab and offices until all the weirdness started. 

This lock is a pain in the ass, too--the normal, day-to-day dust plays havoc with anything that has to move, let alone all the extra stuff that got kicked up when everything started exploding earlier--but she gets it open and flicks on the lights. It's sad and empty in the big main room--Darcy doesn't know when her whole yeah-no-it's-just-a-way-around-the-hard-science-requirement turned into something way more important--but at least with no equipment in the way, she can see right across to the corner where the ladder/steps that go up through the ceiling for access to the roof are down.

" _Yes_ ," Darcy hisses, rushing across the floor and scrambling up the ladder. The hatch at the top is unlocked, too, and Jane, when Darcy finally gets up onto the roof, is curled into one of the chaises, a blanket tucked around her. All the air goes out of Darcy at the familiar sight and she sits down right there on the roof.

"All clear?" Barton's head and shoulders pop up through the roof hatch. Darcy doesn't trust her voice so she just nods and he disappears to presumably consult with Coulson. Darcy could follow--if only just to yell at them about scaring the crap out of her--but everything from the last few days is suddenly dumping down on her and not moving seems like the better option. So, she sits and looks at the stars and the familiar sights of Puente Antiguo in the night. She can hear a couple of cars and the thump of the bass line from the band jamming back at the bar, but it's mostly quiet. A lot of town hasn't gotten electricity back and people have only started trickling in after the mad exodus, but the town's still (mostly) standing, and Darcy can admit that's not something she had much hope for when she'd first seen the Destroyer blasting down the street. 

"Sorry," Barton says from the ladder, and Darcy realizes she doesn't know how long she's been sitting and staring out over the rooftops. "The boss says he didn't mean to freak you out."

"Really?" Darcy finds enough to snort her disbelief. "Not that we're all that close, but that doesn't sound like Coulson."

"I might be paraphrasing," Barton says. "The sentiment was there, though." Darcy rolls her eyes, but he's reaching out and laying something--oh, _yay_ , Darcy thinks, it's her iPod--on the roof between them. "The big stuff is coming back tomorrow, but he gave me that for right now."

It's just a stupid iPod--half the town is in shambles and lots of people don't have houses to go home to--but Darcy almost wants to cry when she picks it up. She fights her voice back to something really close to normal and says, "So, the iPod is back to me. Does this mean the cock-blocking is rescinded, too?"

Barton shrugs and waggles his hand in the universal sign for _eh, maybe._ "Technically, any time I'm out like this, I could get called up, but, yeah, I'm kinda in stand-down at the moment."

He stays where he is, half-in/half-out, and watches Darcy watch him. He's relaxed and easy, even when Darcy asks, "Yeah, and how likely is that to last?"

"Seeing as how you're actually a civilian and Coulson's always bitching about me being poorly socialized outside of the job, I figure I'm clear unless there's serious weirdness." Barton grins at her again. "I think he thinks you could be a good influence or something."

"Oh, that is… _disturbing_ ," Darcy says. 

"Welcome to my life." He says it all light and easy, but Darcy thinks there's a lot of seriousness under it all. "Mostly I just roll with it, but every now and then, I have to seriously wonder if I shouldn't be doing something differently."

"Giant fire-breathing robots from space definitely qualify as life-questioning moments," Darcy says.

"Oh, yeah," Barton agrees. "Especially when it's your first go-round at the CrazyTimes Rodeo." He shrugs. "You end up with a lot of why-the-hell-nots that sometimes don't really make sense later."

"As was being so eye-searingly demonstrated by all the unfortunate table-dancing back at-- _oh_ ," Darcy says, finally putting together how he's still standing on the ladder-stair, halfway across the roof from her. "Are we counting us in that not-making-sense activity?"

"Not on my end," Barton says. His voice trails off, though, and Darcy fills in, "But?"

"But you're looking like the day finally caught up with you," he says.

"That good, huh?"

"Darlin', you're still standing. After a day like today, that's pretty damn amazing, but it was still a hell of a day." 

"Not really standing," Darcy says, since she's not sure she's going to be able to make it back to her feet.

"Not losing it, either," Barton says.

"I think I passed right over losing any grip on reality and went straight into Bizzaro World right about the time things started blowing up." Darcy lays back on the roof and looks up at the stars. "Inviting you along doesn't count as losing it, by the way. It just seemed like a good way to celebrate not being dead."

"It's not bad," he says, and Darcy is not imagining how he definitely sounds like he knows what he's talking about. It's another tick in the column that says she really had known what she'd been doing when she picked him.

"I feel like we kind of lost our momentum, though." Darcy doesn't bother sitting up, but when she turns her head to look at him he doesn't seem insulted. "I mean, as far as having what could be seen as ill-advised—but probably really freaking excellent--sex against the nearest unoccupied wall goes."

She doesn't exactly mean for things to come out quite so bluntly, but, well, it's not really a surprise when they do. It happens like that a lot, especially when she's tired (or comfortable around people, but she's not thinking about that right now.) He looks a little taken-aback--which is not an unusual reaction--but then he laughs, and wow, that's even better than his smile.

"Yeah, we kind of have lost that momentum," he agrees. "This is good, though."

"Yeah, it is," Darcy says. She closes her eyes and focuses on her breathing. She's pretty sure she's not yoga and/or meditation material, but the breathing stuff helps now and then. "You can come all the way up, by the way."

"Sure," he says, and when she looks, he's at least sitting on the edge of the hatch. She frowns at him and he shrugs. "We already freaked you out once—I didn't want to make it any worse."

"We are cool," Darcy says. She kinda likes the thought that went into that attitude and hey, her radar really getting fine-tuned because she's pretty sure there weren't a lot of guys in the bar who'd have even had the presence of mind to realize they could be threatening, much less do anything about it. That all seems a little heavy to be putting out there given that they've only just met, so she looks back up at the stars. She knows way more about them now but all the math and stuff hasn't really ruined how much she just likes looking at them. "Considering that you're in town in a professional capacity I feel like you can tell me if I should be more weirded out about the whole alternate dimension thing?"

"Seeing as how you work for the woman who's been trying to prove that it exists, I don't see why you should be."

"Oh, good point," Darcy says. "I was a little worried it was just denial, but that's actually true. Go Team Jane."

She's not talking really loudly, but Jane must hear her name, because she stirs and mutters irritably. Darcy holds her breath and stays super-still. She shoots Barton a _quietquietquiet_ look that he acknowledges with a nod. The last thing Darcy needs right now is a cranky, sleep-deprived genius, but somebody--Thor, maybe?--must be looking out for her, because Jane just yanks the blanket up over her head and settles back down.

"Okay," Darcy sighs. "Good. She's been running non-stop since even before things started getting super-weird and it's not like she has normal sleeping habits in the first place. If I'm lucky, she'll just crash out up here for the rest of the night and not start off the morning totally delirious from lack of sleep."

"And if she doesn't?" Barton asks, and Darcy shrugs.

"We'll fight about how super-geniuses do too need to sleep and then, because she's the boss, we'll take the truck out into the desert and see what we can see. At this point, I'm guessing it's about even odds that something new falls down out of the sky, which will be a total drag, but if it doesn't, she'll hit the wall around sunrise and I'll catch a nap when she does."

"Which means you should probably sleep now, too," he says. 

"Yeah, but where's the fun in that?" Darcy leans up on her elbows and gives him her best _Life Is Good_ grin, which, she is happy to see, he returns. He's right, though, and not only does she know it, she knows that he knows that she knows it. "Yeah, fine," she sighs. He rolls to his feet--Darcy does _not_ whimper at the smooth bunch-and-flex of all those glorious muscles, but it is a very near thing--and comes over to offer her a hand. She lets him pull her to her feet, but when he goes to let go of her hand, she keeps holding on. She looks up at him, chewing thoughtfully on her bottom lip. He doesn't say anything--which she doesn't blame him for, they'd walked out of the bar with a very clear intent, one that didn't include actual conversation, much less time spent together--but he doesn't pull away either. The day really is crashing down on her; she decides that's a plausible enough reason for finding herself towing him over to the lounge chair that's generally acknowledged as hers. The fact that he's letting her drag him along behind her is not lost on her. In fact, it sort of encourages her to not wuss out. 

"Stay?" Darcy asks, hurrying on (before he can voice the sensible objections she knows they both kind of have) to add, "See, if Coulson hadn't shown up, we could have had some fun and parted amicably. You'd have gone off to do whatever secret-agent-spies do at night and I'd have ditched the trailer and Eric's snoring for sleeping up here. So, I'm here anyway, which is fine, but I feel seriously cheated and so should you, so you should stay." She manages not to wince when she hears herself babbling. "If, you know, you have the time."

She wishes she could have ended stronger, but she's been trying not to lie to herself, so she can acknowledge that she'd be better off hearing him take an out she'd given him rather than having him turn her down flat. He looks down at where they're still holding hands and it might just be that she's really, finally losing it, but she swears she's caught him off-guard. When he looks back up at her, he isn't smiling, but he looks like he's happy somehow. Maybe it's something to do with his eyes and how they're relaxed all of a sudden.

"I have the time," he answers, and lets her get them settled on the second chaise. It's a ways away from Jane's because they've needed their space lately, but close enough that Darcy will still be able to keep an eye out for any strange, astrophysicist happenings. She drags her favorite fuzzy blanket out of the cooler they use to store stuff and leans back against him.

"Sorry," she says after a few minutes. "I know this is probably way boring, but…" She wants to say that after the day they've had, boring is sounding pretty good to her, but he probably deals with stuff like this all the time and she'd really rather not sound any younger and less-experienced than she already has. 

"Darlin'," he says, low and amused, and, _oh, yeah,_ Darcy's brain purrs. _Niiiiiiice._ "You called Phil Coulson, the guy they call the Agent's Agent, the guy who scares the shit out of all the junior agents--you called him a cock-blocker, to his _face_ and I got to see it. That didn't just make my night, it probably made my year."

"Excellent," Darcy murmurs. It's always nice when someone appreciates her utter disregard for tact, even before you add in the arms and abs and eyes. The quiet settles into Darcy's brain and she can feel everything unwinding slowly. Given how tight her shoulders are, she thinks she probably would have been better off if she'd gone looking for quiet earlier rather than replacing the crashing and yelling of the Destroyer with the noise of everyone trying desperately to forget the whole nightmare. Then again, even the thought of quiet had been unsettling earlier. _You do what you can_ , Darcy reminds herself, and right now, what she can do is steady her breathing and maybe sleep a little.

It's still dark when she jolts back awake, gasping for air, a low, hurt whine in the back of her head and a fading vision of nowhere to run and the fire raining down on her, pouring over her skin and her hair and her eyes.

"Easy," Clint's saying, his hands rubbing up and down her arms, soothing her. "Easy, Darce, easy. You're safe; it's just a dream."

"Okay," Darcy pants, but she can't stop shaking and she doesn't think she's getting enough oxygen, which only makes it harder to breathe. "Dream, right." She guesses it's not all that big of a surprise that her subconscious is freaking out, but holy _shit_ , that had been one exquisitely-detailed nightmare, especially since the fire hadn't really ever gotten that close to her. 

"Breathe," Clint says. "Nice and easy, nothing to worry about." He breathes with her, superfast and right in sync at first and then just a little slower, and then slower still. She knows he's doing it on purpose—it's probably covered in Dealing With Hysterical Civilians 101—but she follows along like a good little girl and it works like a charm. She goes from almost hyperventilating to steady, even breaths in way less time than she would have ever believed. "Better?"

"Uh, yes and no?" Darcy says. "I mean, yeah, not completely terrorized anymore—" She holds up her hand to show how it's stopped shaking. "But, you know, I'm not all that excited about how the hot guy I managed to talk into spending the night got to see me scare myself so stupid I forgot how to breathe."

"Not a problem," he says, and before Darcy can mentally chalk it up to the Way Too Good To Be Remotely True column, he adds (like he knows what she's thinking), "Seriously. Nobody deals with shit like that without a little fallout. You think I was in that bar because I like the ambiance? Or that Coulson having a case of the vapors over the doc not answering her phone is normal?" 

Darcy takes a deep breath and lets it trickle out slowly. She's not entirely sure whether she's happy the pros are a little jumpy, too, or if that's just scarier all around, but at least she doesn't feel like a total wimp in comparison. "Okay. So, yeah, everybody's a little freaked out."

"Oh, yeah," Clint murmurs. "The real trick is to remember to breathe. Nice and easy, just like you're doing right now. No matter what's going on, keep breathing."

"Very Yoda," Darcy says, but she keeps breathing slow and steady and the dream fades more and more with every exhale. She decides it also helps to have somebody solid and warm at your back and she promises herself she will look a little more closely at that feeling, especially at how she's applying it to a virtual stranger, but later. Somehow, fighting her way free of her overactive subconscious didn't wake Jane, which is really the first break Darcy's caught all night (well, okay, second because she thinks she has to count the guy with her as a really solid break in her favor.) Working with Jane is kind of like babysitting really tiny babies: you sleep when they do, so Darcy gives her imagination a very stern talking-to and lets herself drop back off to sleep.

* * *

Not surprisingly, her imagination isn't impressed with anything she has to say to it, so she wakes up twice more during the night. Neither time is nearly as bad as the first, and both times, she's remembering to breathe even before she's all the way awake. After the second time, though, Darcy gives it up as a lost cause. She's not cold, not with the solid wall of heat Clint's putting out at her back, but she's a little stiff from being scrunched back into him. She eases herself upright and turns to look at him over her shoulder.

"You good?" he asks, and she guesses it's not a surprise that he's already awake and alert. Secret-agent-ninja-types probably have a hair-trigger that's calibrated to something much less than an intern wriggling out from under their arms.

"Yeah," she answers. "Yeah, I am—thanks. I think I'm giving up, though." 

Clint glances down at his watch and nods. "Six hours isn't bad after all the shit that went down yesterday." He rolls his shoulders and winces. 

"Sorry," Darcy says. "This," she waves vaguely at herself and the roof and Jane and the creaky old chaise she basically guilted him into sleeping on, "can't be all that conducive to getting actual rest." 

"I've slept rougher," he says, but when she gestures at him, he untangles himself from her and gets himself turned around so she can work at the knot she finds just offset from the base of his neck. She's very, _very_ aware of the warm skin under her hands and how one muscle flows into the next, but she keeps her brain focused on actually trying to help and files the rest of it away for later alone-time. "Thanks," he says, his voice low and soft.

"It's the least I can do," Darcy says, her fingers working hard against the last, stubborn remnants of that knot, "especially since it's mostly my fault."

"Nah," he says, reaching both arms up over his head and stretching hard before he grabs one elbow with the opposite hand and twists back around so far that he's almost facing her. "This is all Coulson's fault for keeping me up in a blind for the last couple nights."

"Oh," Darcy says, firmly keeping herself from being rude and staring (not that she blames the lizard part of her brain, because, _wow_ with the flexible), "okay, we can blame him. I'm good with that, at least until he gets Jane's stuff back."

"Today," Clint says, sure and solid.

"If you say so." Darcy will believe it when she sees it, and she is fine with him hearing her dubiousness, but it _is_ heartening to hear it said out loud. 

"I do, and I should probably go find out if any weirdness showed up overnight that might pull resources off making it happen." Clint stands up and pulls Darcy up after him when she holds out her hands. She can, of course, manage to stand up on her own, but where's the fun in missing out on the flex and pull of a gunshow like he's got working? "Thanks," he says.

"For what?" Darcy cocks her head at him. "Not having sex with you?"

"I was gonna say for looking past the jack-booted thug thing and hanging out, but, yeah, I guess that's kinda the same as not having sex with me. Not everybody would have done that." 

"Well, then, you're welcome," Darcy answers airily. As noted before, he has a really nice smile, one that's practically impossible to resist, even if Darcy is pretty sure he works that unmercifully. She feels her way down the creaky, rickety ladder-stairs and absolutely does not squeak when he skips the traditional route and just swings down, letting go of the open hatch and hitting the floor right behind her. She might choke a little, but that's all.

"Sorry," he says. "Wasn't thinking." 

"No, no, you're fine," Darcy manages in what's only a slightly breathless voice, part of which she is attributing to watching all those muscles she'd felt when she'd worked on his shoulders in glorious action. "I'm usually not this jumpy, it's just been a hell of a week."

He shrugs in a self-deprecating kind of a way. "Coulson wasn't kidding about the whole poorly-socialized outside of the job thing."

"You know, I'm pretty sure my life's work is going to include disagreeing with Coulson whenever possible, so don't expect me to back you up on that." Before she loses her nerve, Darcy reaches out and cups his jaw in her hand. Clint goes still and quiet against her, not moving even a fraction of an inch as she leans into him. He can't miss where she's going with this, but he stays still and lets her set the pace, and even when she's kissing him and he's kissing her back, he still moves slow and easy. That doesn't mean she doesn't find herself pressed up against him with his hands buried in her hair; it just means she gets to enjoy every last second of the build. 

She hadn't really meant for it to be anything serious, but _that_ good intention goes flying out the window approximately .02 seconds after he opens his mouth against hers and she falls down into his kisses, lazy and unhurried, like there's all the time in the world, his beard a little rough from where he needs a shave and his hands careful and deliberate where they hold her. She finally has to pull away--really, she _has_ to, oxygen is good--but he doesn't stop, just drags his mouth along her jaw until she turns her head and catches him again, and again, until his phone rings, loud and demanding, and they have to stop for real. He slides his hands down over her shoulders, holding her close for a second longer while they both try to catch their breath, and then digs his phone out of his jacket and flicks it on.

"Yeah, Barton," he says into it, all business except for his voice being a little uneven and hoarse and how he doesn't seem to object that Darcy hasn't stepped back and has, in fact, wrapped her arms around his waist and tucked her face into the crook of his neck. "Right. Yeah, I'm on it; tell Coulson I'll be there in five."

Clint drops a kiss on the top of Darcy's head as he hangs up. "Timing is everything," he murmurs, and Darcy tips her head back to look at him.

"Especially when you don't have it," she gripes, but there's not a whole she can do about the situation, so she smiles and starts to ease back from him. He catches her face in both hands, though, drawing her back into him and his kiss is anything but slow and easy this time. Darcy meets him on equal terms, one hand digging into his hip while the other slides up his back and her heart is pounding when he finally pulls away. He brushes one last kiss across her mouth and that's it.

"Oh, my god, I _hate_ your boss," Darcy mutters as he disappears out the door and leaves her to go deal with the day.

* * *

Clint's right; there are trucks and SHIELD goons at the door almost before Darcy gets the coffee going. Lucky for them, it's only almost, because a pre-caffeinated Jane is not who you want to deal with even when she isn't supervising the return of her confiscated lab, and a pre-caffeinated Darcy is inclined to sit back and let the fireworks fly. Erik doesn't actually function without caffeine, so there's not any help coming from that quarter.

It's still mass chaos as Jane is very, _extremely_ detail-oriented and she knows exactly how each piece of electronics needs to be set up and doesn't let up until it's perfect; and Darcy is of the opinion that SHIELD created this particular Jane-Monster, so they get to deal with her. It could have been worse, but Coulson actually makes an appearance early on and it is super-crystal-clear to everyone that whatever Jane says, goes. 

Piece by piece, the lab gets put back together. Fortunately for everyone, none of the equipment seems to have been damaged during its little vacation, but it still takes a ridiculous amount of time to get everything re-calibrated and humming along properly. Jane blows off Darcy's attempt to get food in her both in the morning and again later at midday, so by the afternoon, Darcy goes for the never-fail strategy of chocolate plus salt plus crunch. She has to make a quick run back to the trailer to fetch her bait, but Jane doesn't notice and the SHIELD team is just happy there's one less person to snarl at them.

Casually, oh-so-casually, Darcy wanders back into the lab and over to where Jane is under a table, taking the opportunity to re-wire the oscillo-whatever that hadn't ever worked at the level she'd designed it for. 

"Jane," Darcy says, making sure her mouth is full. It's one of Jane's little triggers, and sure enough, she pops up to glare at Darcy. "Oops, sorry," Darcy says, swallowing. She considerately holds the tin she's carrying out, and Jane automatically reaches to get some of Darcy's food of the gods. "I was just wondering if you'd had time to double-check the inventory…?"

Darcy walks as she talks, holding the tin out again and very carefully not dancing the dance of righteous satisfaction as Jane follows along with her. 

Erik looks at her with his old-guy, you're-feeding-her- _what?_ glare of disapproval, and hey, Darcy gets that it's not exactly healthy, but it's not like it's all she intends for Jane to eat, or that she does it all the time. The point is: it _works_ and right now, that's all Darcy cares about.

"I went over it, and it looks okay, but you should definitely check it, too, because we are not letting these bozos out of here if even a single thing is missing," Darcy says. Just as she says that, the front door opens and Barton walks in, smirking at the 'bozo' part. Darcy rolls her eyes at him, and is very proud of herself for not letting the little eye-crinkles distract her from her mission. She hands Jane the tablet with the inventory from Coulson on it, and nudges her to sit at a small table, sweetening the deal by putting the tin down in front of her. Jane eats another chip, but then gets sucked into the inventory and Darcy neatly tucks a grilled veggie burrito in Jane's free hand and swaps out the tin of chips for a plate of sliced apples and pears.

She stays super-still until Jane bites into the burrito and doesn't notice the swap, then backs away as silently as possible. Barton follows her, eying the tin with a certain level of disbelief.

"Are those--" He shakes his head, like he can't actually believe what he's about to say, a reaction Darcy gets a lot, cf. Erik, but then he looks up at her and grins. "You lured the woman who just had her theory of trans-dimensional travel proven beyond a shadow of a doubt away from her equipment with _chocolate-covered potato chips_?"

"I totally did," Darcy confirms. His grin turns into a strangled laugh as he tries to keep quiet, and Darcy adds, "I made them, too. Want some?"

She holds out the tin and looks on with satisfaction as he scarfs down a handful and makes appreciative noises. "Oh, shit, this is so much better than MREs I can't even tell you," he says.

There's still a fair amount left, so Darcy takes a couple and then hands the rest over. "Take them," she says. "I can always make more." Even tiny towns in New Mexico have Ruffles and chocolate chips; that's the beauty of the entire concept. Plus, Darcy kind of likes watching people enjoy things she's made, so it's a definite win in her book, even before she gets to watch him lick the last bit of chocolate off his thumb. 

To distract her brain, which is .02 seconds away from skipping down some visual pathways that are completely inappropriate for the lab, Darcy clears her throat and asks, "So, is there any reason you're here? And by reason, I mean, impending disaster?"

"Nah, I'm just here to make sure everything's okay. Coulson's been on one video conference after another, and Sitwell's dealing with all the electronic shit on our side, so I figured I'd stick my head in and check that nobody forgot that Coulson will take it personally if you and the doc slip through the cracks."

"Well, we'd be better if we hadn't had all the stuff taken in the first place," Darcy points out, "but I think we're almost back to where Jane can start running data again."

"Ok, good." He's serious, suddenly, and draws her back to the corner that's half-blocked by the big whiteboards. "Look, I don't want to scare you or anything, but this--" he waves his hands out toward the street and the damage left by the robot-- "this is a game-changer. I know Foster's been saying all this has been possible for a long time, but now it's happened and she knows more about how and why than anybody out there." He digs in the pocket of what Darcy has finally figured out is a kevlar jacket and passes her a card. The SHIELD emblem is embossed on the front and there's a hand-written number on the back. "This is Coulson's direct line--he's gonna come by and talk to the doc, but you need to have it, too. Anything feels weird to you-- _anything_ , Darcy--you call it." 

It's a more than a little scary, what he's saying, but pretending like there's nothing wrong isn't going to make it better, so Darcy nods and slides the card in between her phone and its case. "Should I memorize it and then burn it?" she asks, mostly teasing, but he's really serious, so she adds, "I'll call. Promise."

She wants to add something about how she'd rather have Clint's number, but that seems a little too flip given that he's actually talking about her (and Jane's) safety, but somebody must like her, because he hands her another number, this one scrawled on a torn-out piece of notebook paper. "That's mine," he says. " _Not_ for emergencies--I go off-grid a lot, so don't count on me getting back to you in any kind of a reasonable time--"

"Oh, _nice_ ," Darcy says, arching an eyebrow. "'Here's my number, baby, but I probably won't pick up if you call?' _Classy_ , Barton."

"Welcome to SHIELD," he mutters. His eyes flip from alive and animated to flat and shuttered, and there really are too many times when Darcy wishes her mouth might give her brain a nanosecond or two of warning before it goes and spouts off whatever it thinks sounds cool. Apologizing is probably going to make it all worse, because this is clearly a sore spot, and one that's probably been beaten on before if the tightness in his eyes and mouth means anything, so Darcy goes with a side-step.

"Well, then, you should take mine--I mean, I'm not going to be anywhere but here or at school, so we won't have to worry about anybody being off on a super-secret, black-ops assignment."

"You sure?" 

"Yeah, funnily enough, I am. You're not a bad silver lining to the fire-breathing-robot-from-space cloud." Darcy smiles and scribbles her number on a corner of the paper he'd given her. 

Clint glances at it, then shreds it, grinning at her mock indignation. "I got it, trust me."

"I am," Darcy says, a little more seriously than she intends, but, hey, it's the truth, no matter how odd. Before things can go anywhere else, the door rattles open and Coulson, with more of his exquisite timing, walks in with the rest of his entourage. There's an extended discussion with Jane (who has more than a few questions based on the inventory Darcy'd given her, so score one for the poli-sci intern and her mad organizing skills) and then some semi-polite negotiations about staffing levels and resources. Darcy knows Jane wants to tell Coulson what he can do with his offers of assistance, but they have terabytes of data from Thor and Sif and the boys coming and going, not to mention all the stuff from the Destroyer and however Thor and Loki were communicating right there before the end. It'll take Jane and Erik and Darcy literally years to parse all of it, so Jane does accept the offer. Darcy's a little surprised Erik is okay with that, what with all the I-knew-a-gamma-radiation-expert-who-got-disappeared-by-SHIELD talk, but he's nodding along in satisfaction. 

There's more back-and-forthing, and Coulson does give Jane his number and the call-if-there's-anything-strange spiel, but then Clint is saying, "Boss, we need to roll if we're not gonna keep the Ospreys waiting," and they all sweep back out of the lab almost as suddenly as they'd appeared the first time. 

Darcy catches one last glimpse of Clint as the first wave of the SHIELD exodus heads out of town. He's at the wheel of one of the giant, black SUVs they're all apparently contractually obligated to use, with Coulson in the passenger seat, his phone pressed to his ear, already onto the next crisis, Darcy supposes. Clint grins at her and flicks a quick salute in her direction; impulsively, Darcy blows him a kiss, which gets her an even bigger grin, but then they're gone and it's time to figure out how Team Jane is going to function now that everything's been proven right.

At midnight, Darcy gives up trying to pry Jane and Erik away from their precious data and goes to take a shower and find her bed. Her phone pings while she's getting the conditioner out of her hair (the New Mexico climate is trying to kill her with split-ends, but Darcy isn't going down without a fight); when she finally gets her hair wrung out and her pajamas on, there are three messages, all unsigned and from a blocked number. _The boss snores like you wouldn't believe_ , the first one says. The second one says, _I stole the rest of your chips; dinner of champions_ , and the third one is just a little emoji blowing her a kiss, which makes Darcy smile entirely too hard.

Still, she has some standards, so she doesn't go all wibbly about the kiss, just sends a stern _Don't text and drive_ back. She isn't sure what--or even if--she's expecting in reply, but it's not a _Ma'am yes ma'am_ followed by a another emoji, this one with a cheeky little smile, and for whatever this might turn into (which is probably nothing) Darcy is going to enjoy the hell out of what it is.


	2. Tromso

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...and now we're up to _The Avengers_ , but I'm ignoring 99.9% of the _Thor: Prelude to A Dark World_ comic tie-in. (For completeness sake, the only things I'm taking from it are: _1)_ Darcy is reasonably competent with computers, and, _2)_ [this](http://topaz119.tumblr.com/post/91069187479) panel because, mmmm, Hawkeye.

Darcy isn't exactly thrilled when Jane up and takes them off to Tromso, but that's mostly because she barely gets enough warning to get her hand-washing finished. (She has no idea when she turned into her mother, but in her defense, life seems to go more smoothly when she knows she's wearing kick-ass lingerie under everything else and the stuff she favors is effing expensive and needs a little more care than the no-name laundry swill they sell at the Soap'n'Suds.) 

Otherwise, Darcy totally gets it: honoraria don't exactly grow on trees and money is a good thing. She is one-hundred-and-fifty percent in favor of getting paid. Plus, it totally vindicates her why-the-fuck-not? decision to have gotten a passport as soon as she turned 18, even if she hadn't had the faintest idea where the cash for a passport-needing trip might've come from. She figures she can deal with everything else when it happens, same as she always does.

Through the jet lag and the general oh-my-god-traveling-sucks-the-life-out-of-you, Darcy is happy to notice that there's no snow when they arrive (she hates to be that caricature of the stupid, Ugly American, but she will admit that the north-of-the-Arctic-Circle location had pinged certain preconceptions and she'd barely had time to grab clothes and a toothbrush before they were on a plane, much less sit down and think clearly enough to google the place.) There is also much scenery of the capital S variety--mountains and water and twisty roads along each--pretty enough that Darcy's just holding up her phone and snapping shots without looking and trusting that they'll be awesome regardless.

It's late when they get to where they're staying--student housing at the university--but it's still light, a bright-ish twilight that Darcy is kindof excited to realize is the actual Midnight Sun, but the rooms all have blackout blinds so it remains a source of wonder rather than an active annoyance. Darcy promises herself that she will properly contemplate the thrill of having seen it, but later, after she passes out for the rest of the night.

It's a good thought, a nice plan, but like so many things in Darcy's life, it doesn't quite work out the way she thought it might. They do get a decent night's sleep and a more than okay late breakfast, but after that everything all falls apart. They haven't even found Jane's lab when there's a burst of exclamations from a group clustered around a computer monitor and they're waved over to watch freaking _aliens_ swarming over Manhattan. 

They watch, horrified, for a few minutes, but then Jane, in a burst of practicality, drags Darcy away to another monitor and brings up the BBCi feed, so at least they're getting commentary in English. She and Jane have been through a lot, Darcy thinks, and every new thing is more and more surreal, which is the only reason Darcy doesn't yell when a red cape and blond hair go flying by on the screen and Jane digs her nails into Darcy's hand.

"Ow, ow, _ow_ ," Darcy whispers furiously, and Jane chokes out something that's probably an apology. More importantly, she lets go enough that Darcy isn't in fear of losing her left hand, but not so much that she loses the grounding feel of Jane right there with her. They see Thor--it has to be him, no matter that no one seems to have any clue where the lightning is coming from--three or four times more before the video feed goes black and they get nothing but muted British horror as the talking heads in the studio try to talk around the reasons why they've lost contact with New York.

"Ohgod, ohgod, ohgod," Darcy hears herself saying, because, seriously, _aliens_? Before she can totally lose it, though--hey, she likes the Big Apple, it's her favorite place to hang out when she has a little cash to spend and it's deeply disturbing to see it under attack like that--there's a sudden uptick in loud voices speaking languages she doesn't understand and people are looking at her and Jane (okay, mostly Jane, but they're standing right on top of each other.) Somebody gets it together enough to switch over to English and manages to get Jane's attention over to a couple of monitors, which are going berserk. 

"Oh--" Jane says, taking two steps before she realizes she's still holding Darcy's hand. Darcy rolls her eyes at her, which Jane only barely notices in her sudden SCIENCE attack, but at least she lets go. "Oh, that's _fascinating_ , let me--oh, I need my--"

"Getting our laptops," Darcy says, shooing Jane the rest of the way over toward the blinking, bleating equipment. Being Jane's go-fer is Darcy's least favorite part about interning, but at least it's something to do. It's probably a lot better if they don't sit around and think about whatever's going on, Darcy tells herself as she runs back to their suite of rooms. The rest of the day goes by in a blur of data pointing to multiple impossible things (which, hey, Jane is boss at that stuff and Darcy is damn proud to watch her shouting down all the people who keep insisting that the monitors have to be wrong) and shaky phone-cam videos uploaded to twitter and youtube and vine and instagram (Darcy has all the social media outlets covered, which is good because the Beeb is at least 4 minutes behind twitter in confirming that most of New York is still standing, and that's 4 extra minutes of stress nobody needed.) 

The readings calm down right in sync with when twitter says the hole in the sky over Manhattan is closed. Jane, of course, barely notices, just dumps terabytes of raw data to a server and manages to wrangle Darcy access so she can start running it through Jane's custom-built filters and search backward to identify exactly when things started getting weird. Data analysis is usually the cue for Darcy to take a nap, but she manages to keep herself awake this time, mostly because everything is incredibly not-theoretical now. She doesn't have to speak geek to figure out that it would be a Very Good Thing if they could isolate energy signatures that might give everyone at least a tiny bit of a heads-up if it happens again.

Their nice Norwegian hosts are actually pretty organized: food appears regularly, and somebody stops by to make sure Darcy has everything she needs. They even try to exchange pleasantries with Jane (they really are happy to be working with her; it's very sweet), which goes over like the social niceties usually do when Jane's heads-down in data, which is to say: like the proverbial lead balloon. Darcy thanks them and just assembles a plate of food from what they bring and follows Jane around until she snaps, " _What_ ," and Darcy can hand it over and give Jane the 'no-I-will-not-go-away-until-you-eat' look. Jane is far enough down into her theories that she doesn't even bother to fuss much, just eats like a good little genius and lets Darcy get back to organizing her data.

Between the sun not setting and jet lag, Darcy's internal clock is totally fucked, which she only realizes when she jolts back awake with her head on the desk next to her laptop. The clock says it's four o'clock -- Darcy assumes that's four in the morning. It's definitely time for real sleep, but Jane is still totally engrossed in her data scans, and Darcy knows better than to interrupt her at that. Darcy could just go and leave Jane--it's what they do all the time--but she's not really up for being alone in a place she doesn't know right this second. There's a couch of a sort pushed into the corner; it's not very big, but Darcy's slept on worse. 

The next time she opens her eyes, Jane's curled up on the table next to her laptop, so Darcy drags herself off the couch and goes to see if they can maybe find their way back to their beds. Jane is in full-on stubborn mode, though, and refuses to leave until her data set is rendered, so Darcy compromises by pushing Jane over to the couch and swearing to keep an eye on The Precious herself.

Jane has to be really tired, because she goes with only a minor level of bitching, and only pops up twice to make sure Darcy knows all the things she's been doing for years now. Someday, she isn't going to do that, and Darcy will probably have a heart attack (and then call 911 in case Jane has) but it's strangely comforting right now. The rendering program is also comforting in its complete boringness; Darcy dutifully glances at it while she goes through her twitter feed and tries to decide if it'd be tacky to instagram gorgeous scenery pictures while the world is still reeling from an alien invasion. 

One of the research assistants pokes his head around the door and, when Darcy gives an exaggerated _shhhhh_ finger to her lips and nods toward Jane, tiptoes in, juggling his backpack and some housewife-y-looking bags. His English is okay--definitely better than Darcy's Norwegian (hey, she's got the important stuff, like, oh, _coffee_ ; the astrophysics can chill for awhile)--and they manage to communicate without waking Jane. He has food from the market for Jane and Darcy, which is actually really nice of him. He looks politely horrified when she just piles a little of everything between a couple of slices of bread, but Jane's data sneers at subtleties like a proper breakfast. 

The first modeled set finally pings up and Darcy calls in a consult from her breakfast buddy as to how to get it printed. He tries to explain where the color plotter is, but in the end just goes and fetches the printout for her while she starts the render on the next set that Jane has in the queue. It's kinda nice, having somebody to do her bidding. A girl could get used to that.

Jane wakes up halfway through the render Darcy started. She looks unfairly good for having caught next to no sleep--Darcy doesn't want to even think about what her own hair has got to look like after tossing and turning on the couch--but Darcy can see the strain around her eyes as she goes through her email and looks blankly at the list of messages on her phone. The Norwegians are all too polite to jump all over her, but Darcy doesn't know that them clustered at the other end of the lab, almost vibrating with how much they want to pick Jane's brain is any better.

"Okay," Darcy says, assembling Jane a Norwegian breakfast sandwich of her own. Look out Egg McMuffins. "Your data renders are in process. Write me a blanket 'the weather is here, wish you were beautiful' reply to all the people who are suddenly remembering that you've been saying shit like this is possible for years and I'll take care of your email." She nods toward the where the Norwegians are circling around the printout from the first data set. "You go get your brain on with them."

Jane hesitates for a couple of seconds--she hates not doing everything herself, but the lure of analyzing all the readings overcomes her inner control freak--but finally takes the food Darcy is shoving at her and allows herself to be shooed off toward the rest of the geeks. Darcy settles herself behind Jane's laptop and cues up her best don't-fall-asleep mix and gets the the day after the aliens invaded started.

* * *

Darcy's mixes are prime, but there's only so much music can do, so she breaks up the day with the endless video from New York. Just to keep her poli-sci hand in, she starts a spreadsheet with all the spin angles the politicos and pundits are working. Even with the seriousness of the scenario, she finds herself having way too much fun with how predictable some of the positions are (and how really freaking out there some of the crazier conspiracy theorists can get. It's pretty impressive how totally batshit a sitting US senator can get even with the elevated starting point of an alien invasion.) In between watching over Jane's data crunchers as they do their thing (which is only slightly more exciting than the proverbial paint-drying observational scenario) and chasing Jane down to hand over more food and/or data, Darcy does her best to assemble a timeline of the invasion.

It's hard to miss Iron Man or the creature most of the media is calling the Hulk. _Everybody_ has footage of them. More interestingly, though, Darcy finds a couple dozen links to what looks like pretty legit video feeds that not only feature someone wearing an updated version of Captain America's uniform, but also showcase what looks like the Super Soldier serum in action. Darcy would _really_ like to hear an explanation for that, but most of the press conferences she's found are focusing on the Hulk and whatever it was that Iron Man was steering into the rift right before it all ended. Darcy gets it--the Hulk has a history with New York and it doesn't take much to identify a nuclear warhead (thank god for Colbert, who Darcy can always count on to tell it like it is) when it's aimed at you--but the whole Captain America thing is way too cool to just forget about.

She ends up watching every scrap of footage with him in it, all through the day. Most of it is too shaky and blurry and far away to be remotely useful, but once every ten or eleven files she gets a little nugget of pure gold and he'll throw his shield or vault over a car or three. She screencaps everything that's good and starts a second spreadsheet for all of _that_. She almost has to clap her hand over her mouth when she finds three seconds of him fighting back-to-back with somebody who has to be Thor, because everybody else in the lab is in this super-intense stare-athon that means Jane is in the process of melting their brains. Darcy's in the middle of deciding not to go interrupt them with the Asgardian details (because really, what is Jane going to do with that information right at the moment?) when the next phone-cam video starts and she really does clap her hand over her mouth, because this one shows the Captain America-type person emerging from a downed, scary-looking jet, flanked by two other people, a man and a woman, and Darcy would know the arms on the extra guy _anywhere_.

"Holy shit," she whispers and fumbles for the script that Jane wrote, the one that will download and de-noise any kind of video data. (Jane wrote it for Science, of course; Darcy usually uses it for bootleg telenovas--what? it totally keeps her Spanish fluent--but there's nothing that says it can't make sure her brain isn't flaking out on her now.) 

It helps, but the video was shot from too far away and on too crappy of a phone for Darcy to really be sure it's Clint out there running around. She goes back through all of the New!Cap video she's saved, trying to find him again. It takes her too long to realize that picking out the redhead who's fighting alongside them is a lot easier than trying to find sandy brown hair and sleeveless Kevlar, but once her brain starts working again, she finds the same guy over and over. Nobody really gets anything definitive, but there are a couple of times when Darcy is sure recognizes him in how he's moving, his shrug or the way he zeroes in on something.

She and Clint don't have the romance of the ages (or really, any kind of romance at all), but she doesn't think she's exaggerating to say that they're friends, at least the kind who randomly send each other snarky texts, and she wonders if her brain might just be taking the SHIELD involvement and playing leapfrog with it. She goes back to her timeline-building, but she still keeps an eye out for whoever it is. Even if she's reading way too much into a couple of grainy videos, it keeps her brain busy with something that isn't the latest insane rumor. That's more than enough to justify her little obsession, Darcy thinks, especially as she watches one rumor after another work its way through the observatory. 

The day drags on, mostly dull, but every so often punctuated by some new conclusion Jane is spit-balling, some of which are just too much to process, even knowing the whole backstory of alternate dimensions that Thor brought with him. Darcy isn't all that surprised that a lot of the people who don't have that history can't deal with what their data is telling them now. She's a little disappointed in them, because hey, it's their field and amazing things are happening, but she does get how very disturbing change can be. 

Somewhere in there, Jane actually gives up trying to make people understand and just starts scribbling in her notebooks. Darcy parks herself one desk over and plays guard dog. It's amazing how stupid everyone thinks she is--all she has to do is smile vacantly at them, as though she doesn't understand their accented English and then deliberately answer with something just clueless enough to make them think she thinks they're asking a different question. If anyone ever says something other than how they must speak with Dr. Foster (clearly, Darcy is certain, to explain how her theories cannot be right, all evidence to the contrary) Darcy fully plans on letting them past, but so far, nobody has figured out that Jane doesn't care why they think she's wrong and Darcy sure as hell isn't going to let them waste any more of Jane's time.

The good thing about Jane resorting to pen and paper is that her hand finally gets tired, and then it's relatively easy for Darcy to suggest that a shower and more food might be an excellent use of the enforced down-time. Jane wavers for far less time than Darcy expects--she must be more off-balance than she's letting on, which, y'know, Darcy totally gets--and then gathers her notes and printouts and lets Darcy shepherd her back to their rooms.

"You're very quiet. It's disturbing," Jane says, surprising herself as much as Darcy, if the look on her face is to be believed. "Not that I thought I'd ever hear myself say that--"

"Well, you know, aliens have been falling from the sky," Darcy says. "I mean, clearly, it's a very weird time. Don't expect it to last."

Jane nods and smiles, but it's pretty weak, on both counts. Again with the aliens, Darcy thinks.

"It was him," Jane says, after a couple of minutes of silence. Outside the windows, the sun is low in the sky, the light slanting across the floor and casting long shadows. Jane's voice is very quiet and Darcy knows without having to ask that there haven't been any messages or attempts at communication.

"Yeah," Darcy sighs. "It was." She pulls out her laptop and shows Jane the footage she's found. There really isn't much doubt that it wasn't their very own alien demi-god. Jane watches for a while, and then goes to shower, all without saying anything. Darcy isn't too happy with the big, dumb Asgardian, prince or not. 

When Darcy finishes her own (very, extremely appreciated) shower, Jane's curled up in her bed, probably not asleep, not really, but clearly not looking for any heart-to-hearts. It's just as well, really. Darcy isn't sure she's up for any either. She sits on her bed and combs the tangles out of her hair and tries to think through all the tiredness and the leftover crazy of the day. She really wants to know if that had been Clint she'd found in the videos. He's crazy enough (and good enough) to have been out there fighting, but she never really got anything solid enough to confirm it. She and Jane, they left New Mexico so quickly, she has no idea what's up with their phones, how much it costs to call or text, or even if they still have service. There's wi-fi, and she's gotten a university guest account, but she her laptop is across the room and she's really freaking exhausted. 

"In the morning," she mumbles to herself. She'll send him a snappy email, something along the lines of 'Hey, way to rock the bow and arrow and tear up some alien invaders,' and see if she gets an answer. "For sure." She barely makes under the comforter before she crashes. 

Her brain doesn't want to shut off, though, and it all comes through in her dreams. They're not screaming nightmares, but they're weird and unsettling and the mood they leave behind isn't at all helpful when somebody starts pounding on the door. Darcy comes awake already throwing herself off the bed and pushing her feet into her boots. Jane is flailing her way out of her bed, too, which is just fucking _awesome_ , because it's not like Jane hasn't been walking on the edge of sleep-deprivation since as long as Darcy's known her and doesn't need whatever down-time she can get. Darcy doesn't bother with a robe or anything, just lets the wild rush of adrenaline carry her and her rumpled t-shirt and Yummy Sushi sleep shorts in a righteous wave across the room.

"What. The. _Fuck_ ," she snarls, throwing open the door and planting her hands on her hips. She vaguely recognizes one of the geek-types from the observatory, who's definitely losing his grip on his English as he tries to stammer out what Darcy assumes is an explanation or an apology or _whatever_. There are more people standing out there (and more than a few doors easing open up and down the hall) but Darcy doesn't have her glasses, so it takes Jane gasping, " _Erik?_ " from behind her before Darcy actually 'sees' him in the crowd, his clothes even more rumpled than usual and his hair standing out in all directions.

"Jane!" Erik spins around to face Darcy and Jane, interrupting the flow of Norwegian he'd been all but yelling to someone behind him. "Jane, thank God--I must speak with you--"

He pushes past Darcy without so much as a glance-- _Seriously?_ , Darcy thinks, _What the fuck is up with that?_ \--and sweeps Jane over to the desk, fumbling at his ugly, nylon briefcase. Jane throws one look at Darcy over her shoulder, but then something Erik says makes her head whip around to him and start firing off questions, which means Darcy's on dealing-with-everyone-else duty. She turns back and surveys the crowd. The Norwegians are all milling about, most of them looking like they just want to go back to sleep. Darcy gives them the pleasant but firm smile that means Go Away in pretty much any language, but there are a couple of people in the back who are less susceptible to the power of her non-verbal communication skills. She's just opening her mouth so she can use her words and get rid of them, when they get close enough that even her miserable eyesight isn't a hindrance, and--

"Hey, Darce." It's definitely her very own jack-booted thug smiling at her, but even without her glasses, Darcy can see that it's a really pale imitation of his usual smirk. And the rest of him looks like shit, too, like he hasn't slept in days and probably hasn't eaten all that much either. Even without the look the redhead next to him is shooting at her, Darcy's pretty sure that just saying all that isn't the best idea, so she shoves down all the questions she wants to fire off at him and channels some of her irritation with how the world has gone nuts into an approximation of their usual snark.

"Barton, live and in person? And here I thought the aliens were the craziest thing I'd see this week." It's not her zippiest comment ever, but she feels like it's a decent enough response given the whole alien-invasion factor. Clint relaxes a tiny tiny bit and the woman next to him stops watching Darcy like she's ready to take her down if she doesn't get it right.

"Trust me, you're not the only one," Clint mutters, but then visibly pulls himself together and waves to the redhead. "This is my partner, Natasha--"

"No, _no_ ," Erik all but shouts, agitated and impatient, totally unlike him. Darcy ignores the redhead (even though she has to be the one in all the video from New York and Darcy is dying to find out about the maybe-Cap) and spins around to see what the fuck is happening now. Erik is waving his arms and pacing. "Not with the wave pattern of the Einstein-Rosen Bridge! You must _understand_ what I show you--" 

Jane doesn't look scared exactly, but her shoulders are tense and Darcy has a second or two of disbelief, because Erik never ever raises his voice. Before Darcy can do more than take a half-step toward them, though, Clint's partner is across the room and smiling at Erik. 

"Dr. Selvig, I'm sure it will be easier to explain if you had access to something to write on and all the work you've already saved to your computer." Her voice is soothing, and seriously, Darcy didn't even see her move, she was so fast. She's smiling at Erik, nothing but Zen and calm, but Darcy catches how she's subtly drawn his attention away from Jane, and even better, how she's put herself between Erik and Jane. If Darcy wasn't so fucking freaked, she'd be totally fangirling.

"Oh," Erik says, sounding much less agitated. "Oh, yes, that would be an excellent idea."

"We could go to the lab," Jane offers. "It's relatively well-equipped--"

"No," Natasha answers. She smiles at Jane, but her eyes are still careful, still watchful. "It's probably best that we keep this as quiet as possible." She turns her smile to Erik, and it doesn't exactly soften, but it eases a bit as she looks more closely at him. "Do you agree, Dr. Selvig."

"Yes, yes," Erik says, all grumpy-old-guy-professor now, like he hadn't just spooked the whole freaking room. "Darcy can bring us a whiteboard, and Jane, I can show you--" He half-drops his laptop while he pulls it out of his case and grumbles about how slick it is, but then picks back up with his conversation with Jane, dropping deep into an explanation that Darcy hears as _something-something-gamma spectrum-something-whatever_. He seems totally normal again, which is somehow more disturbing than how he'd snapped at Jane.

"Clint," Natasha says, still in that super-calm, reassuring voice, "Why don't you go with Darcy and see what kind of writing surface we can bring in here."

Clint has this annoyed set to his shoulders--Darcy's about to say she can go hunt something down by herself, let him off the hook for babysitting her--but Natasha gives him a _look_. Even not having any kind of translation service for their super-secret, nonverbal language, Darcy can tell it means to chill out. (Privately, she thinks people on _Mars_ would be able to tell that. Partner-Lady-Natasha has very expressive looks.) Clint just rolls his eyes and relaxes. "Yeah, yeah," he says to Natasha. "Fetch and carry, your favorite occupation for me."

"Well, not _all_ the time," she answers with a tiny little quirk of her mouth.

"Riiight," Clint drawls in response. He's got a smile of his own, and Darcy's brain surprises her with a wave of… envy? as she goes to get real clothes on. It's not that she's tripping out on a possessive kick over a guy she's kissed once or anything. It doesn't even have anything much to do with _him_ , she thinks. She's trying to be more honest with herself, so she considers that while she drags a comb through her hair and pulls it back into a scrunchie to get it out of her face. It's the connection between them, she decides. Someone knowing and understanding you--it's very appealing.

Clint's waiting for her out in the hallway; he leans in to the room and catches Natasha's eye before he lets Darcy lead him down the hall. It's a partner thing, she guesses, but before she can really get started on the shallowness of the relationships in her life, Clint says, "Sorry about that--it's not that she thinks you can't take care of things, it just makes her crazy to have me sitting around with nothing to do."

"Idle hands _are_ the devil's workshop," Darcy says with a pretty perfect deadpan if she does say so herself. Clint evidently agrees what with the side-eye he's throwing at her. She holds onto her composure for a couple of excruciatingly-long seconds, but then she loses it and cracks up. "My grandma used to say that all the time. It kinda got burned into my brain." He's still giving her a look that says he's not exactly sure he believes her, so she adds, "I mean, yknow, before I was five and learned to ignore her." She lets him open the door and they step out into the brilliant, early-morning sun. "I never actually thought about it, but it was probably my first success at ignoring an authority figure."

"This explains so much about you, Lewis," Clint says on a quick huff of laughter that's really, truly him. 

"I know, right?" Darcy links her arm through his and steers him over toward the building with the labs and her breakfast buddy for help.

* * *

"Ok, somebody needs to tell me what's going on," Jane says, sounding like she's about to cry, which Darcy doesn't think she's ever seen, not even after SHIELD took all their stuff. She doesn't blame Jane one bit, though: Darcy's pretty scared and worn-out, too, and she hasn't had to be right there in Erik's laser focus for the whole morning.

"This--" Jane waves her hand to where the walls of their little suite are covered with Erik and Jane's handwriting scrawled across the plotter paper Darcy and Clint had liberated from the technology center. "All of this is incredible, but I don't understand where it originated."

"Or what's freaking Erik out," Darcy adds. Erik's agitation had eased as Jane had understood more and more of what he'd been telling her, but it had taken hours before he'd wound down. Darcy isn't surprised that when they finally convinced him to sit down, he'd fallen asleep almost immediately, slumped over in the one comfortable chair the rooms had.

Clint shares a long, level look with his partner, another one of their conversations without words. Darcy's about to say something more about how she and Jane are in the thick of it, whatever _it_ might be, and how it'd really be nice not to get the SHIELD run-around, but then Clint nods once and Natasha leans forward to say, "Dr. Selvig has been working with SHIELD for the past few months, analyzing an artifact of… non-terrestrial origin."

"'Non-terrestrial' meaning Asgardian?" Jane's voice is calmer, but still brittle, and she doesn't shrug off Darcy's _there, there_ pat on the back of her shoulder.

"Maybe," Clint answers. Jane narrows her eyes at him in surprise, but he meets her gaze evenly, like he knows he's the last person she expected to be answering. "I was assigned to the same project and I might not get the physics, but I know enough to know there's more out there than just Asgard." He shrugs and looks back to Natasha. "It's all tied up with them, though."

Given the serious expression on his face and Darcy's experience with 'non-terrestrial' things (ie, giant flame-throwing robots from space), she knows the rest of it isn't going to be pretty. The reality is still so much worse than she possibly could have imagined. She reaches out blindly and gropes for Jane's hand, because the things they're hearing--Loki and portals and _mind control_ \--are a tiny bit easier to deal with when there's someone there with her. From how hard Jane's holding on, she doesn't think she's the only one feeling that way. 

"Dr. Selvig was adamant that he not be the only person to know all this," Natasha finishes. "He felt you were one of the few people who had a hope to understand it--from how he was speaking, he's likely already losing some of the details."

"And SHIELD just said, 'yeah, sure, Pops, go tell your story?'" Darcy's voice comes out sharper than she'd intended but not by much.

"No, but seeing that Dr. Foster was already personally involved, us coming here was much less of an issue. It even solved a few problems. We--" Natasha flicks her eyes to Clint "--needed to be away from New York, and Dr. Selvig… Well, you saw him. Our promise to help him get to Dr. Foster was a great weight off his mind."

Jane stands up and trails around the small room, moving quietly past where Erik is still slumped into the side of the chair, sleeping heavily. He looks frail, and so much less healthy than Darcy remembers. He doesn't look like he could go tramp across the desert with them now, or drink disgusting combinations of cheap beer and even cheaper whiskey at the bar.

"Days, you said." Jane crosses back to the rest of them. She waves her hand to encompass all the formulas and equations scrawled on the papers. "All of this, in just a few days?"

"Three, four days, yeah," Clint says. "Selvig's a sharp guy and the spear… It cleared everything out of his head but what Loki wanted him focused on. Loki wanted him working the Cube, so it was all he knew, even when--hell, _if_ \--he was asleep. Nothing else mattered." 

Darcy feels her skin crawl at the flat, even words, and only part of it is from imagining Erik--super-smart, and as kind as he is grumpy--not even getting any respite when ( _if_ , her mind reminds her. If.) he slept. The rest of it is from Clint himself, his eyes shuttered, almost blank. It's so not the guy Darcy knows. It's not even the guy she thinks he might be when he's on the job. She'd seen little hints of the asset in New Mexico, and while she knows he can do enough damage to give her nightmares, she also knows he's still him under it all. This guy--it's like nobody's home, like whoever's there is withdrawn and hiding, and a hideous thought nudges its way into Darcy's conscious mind. 

For once, she manages to keep her mouth shut and not just blurt everything out, at least for a little while. Jane goes back to trying to understand Erik's equations and sketches, moving quietly from one sheet to the next and scribbling in her little notebook while Erik sleeps on. Darcy hopes it's helping him, that he's not dreaming of all the bad shit, that he's getting what he needs. Clint and Natasha are in the opposite corner having an amazingly detailed and almost completely wordless argument. Darcy totally expects Natasha to win (because she seems to be the type of person who doesn't lose), but then Clint gets really still and she can see him say _Please_ and wow, that ends it right there. Natasha goes and lies down without another word and Clint drags a desk chair over by the door and clearly sets up to play guard dog. 

After a bit, Darcy gets the other desk chair and goes to join him. 

"You're pretty quiet," he says after a little while. "Wasn't sure that ever actually happened."

"Occasionally," Darcy says. "And ditto."

"Yeah," Clint admits, with a ghost of his regular smile, the real one, the one that, yep, Darcy still can't keep from returning. She lets the silence draw out while tries to figure out how to ask about all the pieces her brain keeps putting together. Jane mutters and scribbles and paces from one side of the little apartment to the next. Erik isn't quite snoring, but he's about a decibel away from it; and Natasha is a still, slight curve on the far bed. As far as weird situations go and all, it's actually pretty peaceful.

Darcy waits until Jane is really deep into her notes, and then says, as quietly as possible, "What you said before, about Erik and what happened…" She almost chickens out because it probably isn't any of her business, but that's never stopped her before. She's always looked at it as there being lot of really slimy things that hide behind people not wanting to intrude and sometimes all it takes to help is to let the world know you're clued in enough to ask. She takes a deep breath and continues, "What you said sounded like it was first-hand experience."

Clint goes still and… not exactly tense, but… drawn in on himself, maybe. It's pretty much all the confirmation Darcy needs. She bites back all the words that want to come spilling out, because they're just filler and noise and waits with him. Clint glances at her, and then looks past her, to where Natasha is somehow right on top of what's going on and has turned so she's watching them. There's definitely more of that wordless communication going on, and then Clint looks back to Darcy and sighs, "Yeah."

It's not anything she hasn't already figured out, but still. It _sucks_ to hear him say it. Darcy breathes out carefully and closes her eyes for an extra-long blink so she doesn't lose her grip. It's not going to help anything if she starts ranting--or worse, crying. That's the last thing this whole situation needs. Clint's still watching Darcy when she opens her eyes again, and if anything, he looks even more withdrawn.

"Okay," Darcy says, which is pretty weak even if it does fit with the don't-fuss mandate she's laid on herself. She swallows and tries again. 

"I'm glad you're here." That's a little better. She nudges her foot against his, her old, battered Chucks against his even more battered, half-laced boots. The breath she doesn't realize she's holding trickles out when he nudges back.

"Me, too," he says, almost too quietly for Darcy to hear.

"Tell me if I'm making you crazy."

"I can do that," Clint answers, and Darcy doesn't think it's wishful thinking that he seems to relax. Across the room, Natasha rolls back over and Darcy stops worrying about being stabbed for pushing too hard.

* * *

Natasha stops pretending to sleep after two hours, but Clint gets his stubborn on and won't take her place on the bed. Natasha is less than pleased, to say the least. Darcy stays as far out of the line of fire as possible, watching as they glower at each other until Erik jolts awake and he and Jane are back at it.

Darcy watches them flail around with sorting through everything they've already written down, because seriously, she has no idea what they're talking about and with as many advanced degrees as they have between them, managing their documentation should not be a problem, but she can only take so much before she sighs and gets to her feet.

"Stop," she tells them, shooing them over to where the unused paper is. "You're making my brain hurt." She's kind of at the end of her rope with dealing with the geniuses and it must show, because Jane goes meekly enough and Erik only hesitates for a second or two longer. Darcy puts her ear buds in and finds a reasonably soothing playlist and gets her little intern-groove on. 

She starts with taking pictures of everything Jane and Erik have written out, Step 1 in the process of getting them on Jane's laptop and digitized for search and sorting. She probably should have been doing it earlier, but she'd been too distracted by… well, stuff. She's just sorry it wasn't for good reasons, like a certain agent's eyes or how he wears jeans and boots so well, or the way she can tell his arms are still awesome. It sucks when reality interferes with the important things in life.

Like most of the stuff Darcy works on for Jane, getting unintelligible scribblings digitized is not especially exciting, but it's at least marginally satisfying to watch everything be sorted out and organized into tidy little files. If her family ever heard her say that, they'd fall over dead from laughing, because Darcy is not a neat-freak, not by a long shot, but making sure things don't fall down through Yggdrasil's roots and disappear makes life with Darcy's resident genius sooooo much less stressful. Plus--and this is truly the thing Darcy never expected--she likes feeling like part of the team that's discovering crazy-wild stuff. Sure, Jane can do this kind of crap, but it takes a fair amount of time and Jane's time is for sure better spent on the think-y stuff. It's why she has an intern and it's a far better use of Darcy's time than 6 credits of science stuff that she'll never remember.

Once Darcy gets in front of the backlog and looks up, Jane and Erik are still scrawling equations and theories and the professional badasses in the other corner haven't come to any resolution of their issues either. Darcy shrugs and keeps possession of Jane's laptop so she can start another data set render. And then, once she has been a good and industrious intern, she treats herself by skimming the _Cap2012_ hashtag on twitter. There are some seriously nice photos surfacing now that people have access to power and wifi. There are also some deeply scary shots of the destruction across New York, but she will deal with that later. For now she sits and skims the tag and tries to convince herself that she's dreaming when she can't help but feel like it's not just some guy in a Captain America uniform, but the real deal. It's crazy, but the more she looks, the less weight she's giving to reality. 

Plus, yow. Whoever he is, he is almost as cut as Jane's Asgardian prince. 

"Hey, Darce." Clint's voice is loud enough to be heard over her music; Darcy only jumps a little bit when Clint touches her shoulder and points to the food he's evidently gone and fetched. "What's got you so focused?"

"Just checking out the Star-Spangled Man from New York," Darcy says, pulling her earbuds out. Clint glances down at the laptop screen and all the spandex currently showcased thereon and then smirks at Darcy. "I feel like I should mention that was not a guilty freak-out."

"Yeah, right, like you weren't drooling over his ass." Clint has a pretty epic deadpan. It's totally not fair how that makes Darcy's heart skip a beat. "'Cause I'm pretty good about seeing things and that's what it looked like to me."

"Oh, of course I was checking out his ass," Darcy answers promptly. "I'm just not feeling bad about it."

"It's a very nice ass," Natasha agrees. "Nothing to feel guilty about there."

"Thank you," Darcy tells her, and then gives Clint her best innocent eyes. "No guilt, just surprise."

"Whatever you two need to tell yourselves," Clint mutters, sidestepping the backhand Natasha throws at him. It's like a well-rehearsed stunt, everybody moving in perfect harmony. Darcy's fascinated (and still maybe a little jealous.)

"Jane," she calls, distracting herself from things she really doesn't need to get stressed about. "Food's here, and I am not chasing you all over this apartment. Come feed your brain so it can keep up with everything you want it to do."

To Darcy's surprise, Jane actually pulls herself out of EquationLand and re-engages with the rest of the world. It all makes sense, though, when she steers Erik toward the food, too. Jane might be crap at taking care of herself when she's lost in her work, but she can be all fierce-momma-bear when someone she's allowed herself to care about is in the cross-hairs. 

No matter what, though, she's really bad at small talk, so when she makes grabby hands for her laptop, Darcy hands it over without further comment. Jane types with one hand and scrolls with the other, which is pretty much normal for her. Erik hunches over his plate as though someone might snatch it away from him, which is really fucking not normal. Darcy isn't thinking about the whys of the change. She's _not_. 

"Oh!" Jane says suddenly. "Oh, no, I was supposed to be meeting with a group of post-docs today."

"Oh, crap," Darcy mutters. She's not technically in charge of Jane's schedule, but she usually stays on top of things just to keep shit like this from happening. What with how crazy-sounding Jane's theories are (no matter that they're _right_ , people just don't want to see it), she's always been super-touchy about not looking like a flake. "Crap, crap, crap."

Jane's abandoned her laptop and is scrabbling through the mess on the little table next to her bed, searching until she finds her phone and then disappearing out into the hall to make the call without another word.

Darcy goes through her own calendar, just to make sure there isn't anything else they've missed, but she's barely even gone through the day when the door slams back open. 

"Oookay," Darcy says as Jane all but throws her phone on her bed. "They took it personally that you missed the lecture…?"

"No," Jane snaps. "No, they were very accommodating. In fact, _they_ were apologizing."

"For...?"

"It turns out they don't really know what they want me to do, because they didn't actually invite me here." Jane stops and takes a deep breath, and then turns and glares at Natasha. "They got a call about some unexpected funding that they were welcome to make use of, so long as they offered me a lecture series."

"Dr. Foster--" Natasha is working that super-soothing tone again, but Darcy's pretty sure she isn't actually expecting it to work.

"Please do not patronize me," Jane snaps. 

"I'm not," Natasha answers. She's still very calm, but she's letting people see a little bit behind the facade, and Darcy is, frankly, a little bit scared at everything that's hiding there. Clint moves up so that he almost literally is guarding her back. "Loki was in the wind, Dr. Selvig had already been compromised, and it wasn't a far stretch to see that you could be next."

"Which still doesn't explain the decision to keep me uniformed," Jane answers.

"I don't know what was happening or why it was decided in that way," Natasha says. "I was… assigned to a different arm of the operation, so I don't know what exactly forced Coulson's hand with this job offer. Please believe me when I tell you that your safety was paramount."

"My safety, or my knowledge?" Jane fires back.

"Both," Natasha says flatly. Jane's mouth tightens. "You asked me not to patronize you," Natasha reminds her, waiting until Jane nods before she continues, "The things that only you understand… To have had that fall into Loki's hands would have been catastrophic, but I also believe that Coulson thought about you as a person, too. This--" she waves her hand to encompass the room-- "it wasn't just a distraction, but something that might benefit and interest you."

Clint breathes in, harsh and sharp, and says, "Yeah, that was Phil." His voice is rough and Natasha reaches back to brush her hand across his his. 

" _Was?_ " Jane asks before Darcy can choke out the same question, and they both know the answer before Natasha nods once. 

" _Shit_ ," Darcy whispers. "Shit, shit, _shit_."

"Yeah," Clint says in that same rough voice. There doesn't seem to be anything else to say and the room falls into an uneasy silence, heavy with grief and--Darcy can admit it to herself even if she can't say it out loud--fear. 

Jane goes and sits down on the bed, staring blankly at the papers scattered across the room. Erik is heads-down at his computer, and if there's a bit of him that isn't uncomfortable and stiff, Darcy is missing it completely. 

"It was… very unpleasant," Erik says finally. He doesn't look up. "I'm glad someone thought to remove you from harm's way." 

It doesn't really address the whole keeping-them-in-the-dark thing, but it's the first thing Erik's said that isn't about whatever he's trying to get out of his head--and Clint is coiled so tightly Darcy thinks he's might start breaking his own bones--so she decides to just leave it alone. Jane still has that stubborn set to her jaw, but she's quiet, too, at least until she starts trying to tidy the papers next to Erik. 

"This--" Jane starts. "This is ridiculous." Her hands are shaking a little as she reaches for her laptop. "This is a _toy_. We can't possibly expect to solve anything with it, and I understand, Erik, I do--we can't put any of this onto the university's databases here, but we can't do this on just our laptops. We need to go home--we need at least the systems we have online in New Mexico. We probably should be writing an application for time on one of the Crays--" She breaks off and gets herself firmly back to the here and now. "There's no reason for us to be here--I'll give them back their honorarium. I don't care--"

Darcy does actually care about the money, but she understands what Jane is saying--and everything that lies underneath. 

"We have return tickets," Darcy says, trying to think, to be useful. It's not going to help anyone if she loses her grip now. "I can start figuring out how to change them--oh, god, do you think we _can_ get home? I mean, are they still letting flights in and out?" 

"Nat?" Clint says as Darcy stops babbling--she knows that's what she's doing but fucking sue her, the world is being too freaky. Natasha nods, and Clint continues, "We took one of Stark's jets over. It can be on the runway with a flight plan filed by the time we can get to it. Anywhere in the world."

Darcy's brain can't decide if that's the nicest thing anyone's said to her since aliens started falling from the sky, or if it's just one more check in the Hi, We're From SHIELD, Let Us Manipulate You column. From the look on Jane's face, she can't decide either. Clint's gone into that super-non-threatening body language, so he's apparently following right along.

"That would be excellent," Erik says unexpectedly. "We would be able to continue our conversation there." Jane nods thoughtfully, but she's still waffling, Darcy can tell.

"If it helps," Clint says to Darcy, softly enough that she's the only one hearing him, "we can be at separate ends of the plane and you can ignore us."

"It might." Darcy shrugs as she goes to have a confab with Jane. She's fully expecting to be running all the options for their return ticket, but whatever Jane's getting from Erik must be even more world-changingly important it seems because Jane only says, "Are you okay with flying back with them? It would help to be able to continue with Erik."

"I'm good," Darcy says. What she means is that home would be reallyreally _really_ awesome-sauce and she doesn't care how she gets there. It's probably not the best frame of mind to be making unbiased decisions, but she does actually trust Clint and, by extension, Natasha, SHIELD or not. She saves the opposite-ends-of-the-plane offer for the probably inevitable genius melt down and goes to start packing things up while Jane sails off to give away the only money Darcy's liable to see for the next few months. 

They've only been there for two nights, but Darcy really isn't on top of her game, so it takes way longer than it should to get everything sorted out. Clint disappears to go deal with the plane and Natasha carefully maneuvers Erik into not completely undoing everything Darcy's doing. Darcy contemplates kissing her in sheer gratitude (because screeching at Erik isn't going to do any good) but decides they probably don't know each other well enough.

Jane comes back and isn't in complete bitchtastic mode, which Darcy takes as good news, but she's still tight-lipped and tense, which isn't doing the migraine dancing around the edge of Darcy's vision any good at all. It's even worse on the trip back to the airport. Clint's driving and Erik, due to all the shit he's gone through in the last week, gets to ride shotgun. That leaves Darcy, Jane, and Natasha squashed into the back seat, with the bags that wouldn't fit into the trunk packed in around them. 

Clint winds them along the coast and across the bridge where the late evening light slants low to reflect off the water. Darcy can't even think about the pictures on her phone, all the gorgeous scenery that never did get uploaded or shared. She isn't sure she'll ever be able to even look at them again, not with knowing everything she knows now.

The Stark Industries jet sitting on the runway that Clint finally gets them to is easily the best thing Darcy's seen for days. She waits to be freed from her middle seat as patiently as she can (which isn't very patiently, she'll cop to that, but she at least manages not to whine out loud.) Also of the good is the fact that, yow, Stark Industries does not fuck around with interior design. Darcy would be very happy to live in their plane permanently, even before the flight attendants swoop in and start taking food and drink orders. 

Jane and Erik take over an area that's set up for working, Clint disappears up into the cockpit and Natasha does some kind of fade-into-the-background deal where she's sitting right there but it takes all kinds of concentration to actually notice her. Darcy falls into a seat and halfway listens to the lather-rinse-repeat that's Jane and Erik's freaky alien object knowledge transfer. Now that she's not trapped in the Backseat of Doom, her head has eased off from feeling like it's ready to explode, but it still aches dully and the rest of her isn't far behind. 

She should sleep--she's gotten maybe six hours over the last two nights combined--but her brain just will not shut down. Everytime she closes her eyes, she's treated to endless loops of the videos of Manhattan that she'd found (okay, it possibly had not been the best idea to watch them so obsessively, but too late now), or worse, her imagination wants to fill in all the gaps not just around the video, but around all the things nobody's really talking about, around everything that happened to Erik and the really fucked-up shit she's pretty sure she's seeing behind the locked-down, professional no-emotion in Clint's eyes, and all the things nobody's saying about Coulson and how he d--

 _Right_ , Darcy thinks, finding herself on her feet with her heart pounding. _Sleep is definitely a no-go._

She can feel Natasha's eyes on her, but at least Jane is still distracted enough not to have noticed anything's up. She waves Natasha off and stumbles toward the back of the cabin where she can see a TV and a seating area that starts off tucked under the windows and then curves out into the middle of the cabin. She drops down into the corner, pulling her knees up to her chest and making herself breathe slow and steady.

"Hey," Clint says an indeterminate time later, and Darcy opens her eyes to see him crouched down on the floor in front of her. He smiles at her and holds out a bottle of water, waggling it until she takes it and drinks a little of it. 

"Natasha totally ratted me out, didn't she?"

"Eh." Clint shrugs. "More like she saw her chance to get me out of the cockpit before I pissed off the actual pilots." He reaches up slowly, telegraphing every move, and when she doesn't brush him off, smooths her hair back out of her face. "And there was maybe a little ratting out occuring, too. Nat is all about being efficient." He tucks her hair behind her ear. "You okay?"

"I was breathing," Darcy tells him. She's not entirely sure if she's making sense, because her brain has apparently decided that Clint being right there in front of her is a safe place and so is rapidly losing its grip on everything, but Clint nods like he understands, so maybe she's not acting like a complete idiot. "It's just… This all sucks."

"Yeah," Clint says. "It does." His voice is soft, maybe because he doesn't want to draw attention to their little confab, but he sounds tired, too, worn down in ways that go beyond the physical, and that more than anything makes Darcy reach out and lace her fingers through his. He smiles at her, but it's so far from his normal cocky grin that the tears she's been fighting back for hours well up and threaten to spill out, which is just an awesome addition to the day. Or, y'know, _not_.

"You don't have to babysit me," Darcy says, because however craptastic this all is for her, she's been on the periphery and he's been in the middle of it all. Beyond annoyed with herself, she scrubs at her eyes with her left hand, which is awkward, but worth it because she doesn't have to let go of his hand with her right. "All stupid evidence to the contrary, I'm okay if there's something you need to be doing."

"No, I'm under orders to stand down." Clint flicks his eyes back toward the front of the plane--and presumably Natasha, who is the only person Darcy can see giving orders he might follow--and squeezes Darcy's hand a little. "I can clear out if you want--"

'I really, really don't," Darcy interrupts, tugging on his hand until he unfolds from his crouch and settles down next to her. It's a little awkward at first, but they finally end up both sitting sideways, facing each other and still holding hands. "What I said earlier still goes, okay? Tell me if I'm making you crazy because I do not want to be dumping my shit on top of yours."

"Not making me crazy," Clint tells her, dropping his eyes down to where he's stroking his thumb over her knuckles. Darcy's a little mesmerized by it, too, which is probably something she should be thinking about, but it's going to have to be later, because she's way too busy storing up how warm his hand is and how she can feel his calluses and see all the semi-healed nicks and cuts on his skin. 

"I saw you," Darcy murmurs. "You and Natasha in New York. I mean, there's video out there and I recognized you."

"Yeah," Clint answers, still watching their hands. "We were there."

"It looked pretty… intense."

"Yeah." He looks up finally. "It was that."

Darcy turns their hands over and touches the scratches that mark his skin, all along the back of his hands. He's utterly still but doesn't pull away, not even when she pushes the sleeves of his jacket up and finds more and more of the little cuts, over his wrists and up onto his forearms.

"Glass," he whispers. "Went through a window."

"Before or after you got Loki out of your head?" 

"After. Near the end." His voice is still low. "Ran out of arrows and had to take a dive off a building."

There isn't so much as a quarter-inch on his arm that isn't marked up, and even if most of them are shallow scratches, there are enough that are deep enough to be cuts that _hurt_ , dozens of them. Darcy isn't sure why that's what pushes her over the edge, but she's crying before she knows it, everything she's been shoving down tearing loose and flooding through her.

She keeps her head down while she fights for control, but the tears come fast and heavy, so that she can't wipe them away before they fall onto his hand, his wrist. 

"Darcy, hey, are you--" Clint turns his hand over so he can hold hers. "Don't cry, darlin', please don't cry--"

Darcy shakes her head helplessly, because now that the tears are out of the bag, so to speak, she is not seeing any way to stop them, at least not in the near future. Clint hesitates for a few seconds, like he's debating with himself, but then he shifts around and gathers her up. Darcy hesitates herself, resists for a few seconds of her own, because she shouldn't be dumping her shit on him. She should be dealing with this, she _knows_ that, but she just can't find it in her to pull away and she ends up burrowed into him. 

"It's okay, it's okay," Clint's murmuring, and at least she's managing to keep mostly quiet, because she really, _really_ does not need the rest of the plane in on this breakdown. She holds on to him tight and lets it all wash through her. "It's okay; it's a mess, I know, but we're out on the other side…" 

Darcy thinks of Erik and Coulson and Clint himself, and knows he's not being entirely truthful, but she also knows that he's saying it as much for himself as for her. Her head is pounding again, and her eyes feel like they're ready to explode, but she's maybe a little bit better now that she's not fighting to stay in control. It's done and there's no going back and the world is still spinning. She manages a couple of deep breaths and doesn't end up choking on sobs, and feels Clint relax a little bit against her even if he isn't letting her go. 

"Sorry," she manages to choke out, gathering herself to pull away, because really, he has enough shit to deal on his own. "Sorry, sorry--"

"You're not making me crazy," Clint says, and Darcy thinks she feels him dropping the lightest of kisses on the top of her head. "You're not, so if you're moving on my account, don't."

"'Kay," Darcy mumbles. She's down to random, hitching breaths that aren't quite sobs, so she focuses on breathing and lets the last of the tension shudder out of her. Clint doesn't let go, not even when she's settles. Darcy makes herself trust that he'd tell her if he needed space and just takes the tissues he's managed to produce and lets him wrap a blanket around the two of them.

* * *

Natasha comes to fetch them when the plane lands in Newfoundland to refuel. Darcy hasn't actually slept, and she doesn't think Clint has either, but being close to someone that her subconscious has decreed Safe is restful in a way Darcy hadn't expected. Clint presses a kiss to her forehead and goes off to talk to (his words) / annoy (Natasha's) the pilots.

"We haven't actually told them where we're going," Natasha says. "We're filing flight plans in bits and pieces, just in case."

It's all very paranoid, but who is Darcy to object?

Jane is asleep on one of the smaller couches and Erik has a seat reclined as far back as it will go and is snoring lightly. It's almost normal--Darcy's come across nearly the same scene a dozen times--except for the part about why they're here, in one of Tony Stark's planes, and who they're with. 

"Is he going to be okay?" Darcy's looking at Erik, but she's pretty sure she's talking about Clint as well. 

"I don't know," Natasha answers, not unkindly. "It's not something we really understand. Thor wasn't sure either."

"Well," Darcy says. "Thor."

"Yes," Natasha answers with a tiny quirk of a smile. Darcy is unreasonably proud to have gotten even that much of a reaction. 

"I mean, I love the guy, but he wouldn't be my go-to for anything other than a full-out assault." 

"No," Natasha murmurs, looking past Darcy to where Clint is leaning into the cockpit. "Perhaps his mother might know, but even then, I'm not sure how they might be able to communicate it to us."

"Jane might figure that part out," Darcy says even though she's been around too long to underestimate the magnitude of that order no matter how brilliant and driven Jane is.

Natasha inclines her head but doesn't say anything. Clint comes back through the cabin and makes a beeline for the coffee carafes. He drinks two of the (really not all that small) cups faster than anyone Darcy's ever seen (and she's had more than her fair share of 8 a.m. lectures) and then goes and throws himself back down on the longer couch. 

"At least one thing is trending better," Natasha says, not really looking away from where he's rooting through where the DVDs are stashed. "Thank you."

"For what? Having hysterics on him?"

"In a manner of speaking, yes." Natasha turns that unreadable gaze back to Darcy and she is not at all ashamed to admit that it's unnerving. "He does what he does to help people and that was taken away from him. You trusting him let him find at least a little of that again."

"Okay," Darcy answers slowly, but Natasha is apparently done with the caring and sharing portion of the day, so she goes and flops down on the couch next to Clint. 

"We've still got the better part of a day to go," Clint says. "I'm thinking a Bond marathon." He's trying a little too hard, playing it a little too casual for Darcy to believe he's really okay, but she really did have hysterics all over the guy. The least she can do is play along.

"Sure, so long as we start with Craig."

"Wrong answer," Clint says. "So, so wrong."

"He's devoted to Connery," Natasha says, leaning over the back of the couch and neatly plucking the DVD out of Clint's hands.

"Of course," Darcy sighs. "It's probably in the SHIELD contract."

"Very cliche," Natasha agrees.

"I'm sitting right here," Clint says, but he sounds more like himself than he has the entire time, so Darcy just rolls her eyes and waves at him to get the movie started.


	3. On The Run

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, we're up to _Captain America: The Winter Soldier_. Also, I'm writing super-slow, and clearly, _Age of Ultron_ completely jossed this entire fic, but I won't tell if you won't.

HYDRA comes for Jane while the fires from the Triskelion are still shrouding the monuments on the National Mall with oily black smoke. Darcy is streaming Al Jazeera's live-at-the-scene coverage and is following the rumors of Captain America's involvement with the helicarriers crashing into the Potomac with the kind of keen attention to detail born of desperation and the need to keep her brain out of anxiety spirals. That way leads to stupid, life-threatening mistakes and everybody knows they don't have time for that. 

Thor is with Jane and Erik (who is not doing all that great, not that Darcy blames him. He should be enjoying being the goofy, genius Professor Emeritus of the physics department, not having PTSD flashbacks to aliens.) Darcy's in the server room, over-writing the last of the server drives when the lights flicker once and go out and all the windows in the lab outside implode as approximately a zillion people come crashing through, boots first. The servers have their own, dedicated power source, which at least means her data wipe isn't interrupted (she's almost done, thank fuck), but the rest of it _sucks_. 

Big time. 

Her brain throws her under the desk without her actually, consciously thinking about it, and she manages to get an arm up over her face as she goes, so she avoids glass shards in her eyes when they kick in the doors to the server room. The rest of it isn't too great--she slams her knee into the floor and then lands awkwardly on her elbow and shoulder. She's all the way down at the end, in a corner, and she's hoping that they'll just gloss right over her, but of course she's not that lucky, because there are three guys (girls? Darcy honestly can't tell a gender, not with all the black and masks and goggles and all, and she probably is being super-sexist to just assume that HYDRA is all guys, but whatever) coming right for her (or probably the servers, but yeah, same diff at this point.)

She's right in the middle of trying to decide whether it'd be better or worse if they thought she was Jane (she knows they don't look all that much alike, but they're both dark-haired and female and Darcy hasn't met all that many women physicists, to be honest, so she's guessing them thinking they've nabbed Jane if they get her is pretty likely. Plus, nothing she's seen or read about HYDRA screams any kind of value placed on subtlety, so she's going with them assuming any girl in the lab is going to be Jane) when there's a white flash that pretty much kills her vision and all the goons start yelling. From the way they're cursing, Darcy figures out that as much as the flash hurt her, it was a hundred times worse for them in their night-vision goggles. 

Even not being able to see anything but vague shadows in the white, Darcy decides it's now or never (at least the rest of them are in worse shape than she is) and eases out from under the desk. There's glass all over the floor, but she grabs a binder and uses it to sweep a path in front of her so she (hopefully) won't cut her hands and knees to ribbons as she crawls along the wall and toward the door in the back corner. Along with it going straight outside, it has the extra bonus of being exactly opposite where everybody else is. The goons are still snarling curses, but nobody seems to be moving toward her. She can't really see anything, of course, but her hearing has sharpened up nicely. If her heart would stop thundering away, it would really help, but with all the adrenaline crashing through her system, she figures that's not going to happen any time soon.

She's almost to the door (and freaking out about how she just knows she's going to get a taste of freedom/safety but have it snatched away, and yes, her brain really is that over-dramatic, she's used to that enough that she can at least keep functioning during the freak-outs) when she hears something fly through the air with a whistling swoosh and then a thump as it embeds itself in the wall. Her brain almost goes off-line in terror, but that one tiny, still-rational part (the part that had thrown her under the desk before) squeaks _arrow, arrow, ARROW_ and just the possibility of it being right and a certain archery-loving non-HYDRA agent being on the other end of it keeps her moving long enough to actually get to the door. Her little scrap of courage takes a beating at having to stand up to get the door open, but two more hopefully-arrows thunk into the room and the yelling increases, taking on a panicked edge, so Darcy metaphorically closes her eyes and takes the leap, easing the door open and squirming out.

The first gulp of fresh air is enough to make Darcy giddy, but she slams on the brakes and forces her brain to keep working. Her eyes are better, but they're still not particularly happy about the white-out and the midday sun isn't helping anything there. She covers them with her hands, letting just the tiniest bit of light in past her fingers, but only manages two faltering steps. Seriously, walking without being able to see? _So_ not fun. She's just about to drop down so she can crawl--fuck dignity, she wants as much distance between her and the not-nice people with the guns and kevlar--when a hand grabs her upper arm right as a familiar voice hisses in her ear, "Holy shit, Darcy, why aren't you with Foster and Thor?"

Of all the zillion things that flash through her brain--seriously, it's like a hamster on crack sometimes--it probably shouldn't be a surprise that the one that comes out of her mouth is all but drowning in sarcasm. "Oh, I don't know, they're so cute together. I thought they needed some couple-time." 

Clint snorts as he gets her moving, faster than she ever would have believed possible, his hand under her elbow guiding, not dragging for all that he keeps her upright when she stumbles. She must have passed into some kind of delirious state, because her brain is having all these thoughts about how it's all very symbolic, her trusting him and him not dragging her. She shakes her head once--just to clear it, because _seriously?_ \--and adds, in as no-nonsense of a voice as she can, "Jane's with Thor, where her brain belongs, and I was finishing up in the lab." 

"Right," Clint says. "We're bouncing relays through phones and Stark's AI, so I got the part about the doc being with Thor, but I thought that meant you were clear, too." His voice is only a little tight, but Darcy gets the feeling it's a big tell. "Fuck, I shot in there blind--"

"No prob," Darcy gasps (they're moving fast, okay? And yeah, maybe she's freaking out a little, but it's finally penetrating that she's right in the middle of a Black Ops war, which is somehow even scarier than Dark Elves invading London.) "I was on the floor and I'm totally fine with you messing with the bad guys."

They duck behind something that's probably a car (but could be a giant metal duck for all Darcy's eyes are helping her) and she sinks gratefully down to the ground. Clint crouches close to her and keys on his throat mic. Darcy can hear Thor's familiar booming voice coming from Clint's earbud even from where she's sitting.

"Whoa, whoa, chill," Clint says. "I've got her clear, and for the record, you could be a little more descriptive the next time you give a sit-rep because it would have been nice to know she was in the lab before I started shooting." He cocks his head, listening, even while he's lining up arrows on the ground in front of him. "No, no, hold off on the lightning for now, I still need to pull the hard drives. I'm not leaving those bastards any chance of recovering data--"

"Wait," Darcy says. Clint ignores her and keeps telling Thor about how he'll only need a couple of minutes and where he's going to leave Darcy in case something happens while he's inside and Thor needs to come rescue her, and really, Darcy is completely fucking _over_ this day. " _Clint_." 

"It'll be fine--" 

"Listen to me for two seconds, okay?" Darcy hisses and smacks him on the leg, which, _ow_ , muscles. Even with her eyes still dancing with spots, she can see his jaw set, which is all well and good, very manly and determined, but she knows Natasha has to have trained him better than to be talking over her when she has important information to convey. "I was still in the lab because I was wiping the data." _That_ gets his attention, hallelujah, and she's not above smirking over the look on his face, the one that says he's realizing he might have underestimated a few things. "Boot and nuke, and the files were encrypted with mil-spec keys to start with. _Plus_ , I did a random overwrite before I wiped the--" 

"You're serious?" Clint demands. "You wiped the servers?"

"Totally," Darcy answers, with great satisfaction. "Jane and her giant brain figured out the protocol we used--oh, she has the back-ups in her backpack of doom, which is also why Thor is with her." 

She smiles triumphantly and Clint's hit-by-a-truck face slowly morphs into a matching grin, eye crinkles and all, and yeah, two years of nothing but random texts hasn't really done much for the basic attraction that had sparked right from the start. (She spares a thought for Ian, but as sweet as he he'd been, and as much fun as they'd had before there was an ocean between them, her lizard brain is allllll about the guy in front of her.)

"Darlin'," Clint sighs, and yup, the time also hasn't done a thing for how that casual endearment (really, Darcy is pretty sure he's the kind of guy who has pet names for everyone, so yeah, _casual_ , she reminds herself) just kind of slides right on in and makes itself at home. "I could kiss you right about now."

"Okay," Darcy answers promptly, because casual or not, she is not _stupid_. "What?" she continues, narrowing her eyes as whatever Clint had been about to say to Thor gets lost in a choking noise. "I know it's been awhile since we've seen each other, but we've already established that we'd do each other and wiping the hard drives was totally a good idea and good ideas deserve to be re--"

The rest of what she means to say gets lost in the fucking _awesome_ kiss Clint lays on her, hard and just on the right side of too rough. Darcy is super-proud of her brain for getting with the program immediately and kissing him back, because it would have been completely tragic to have missed out on even a millisecond of it all. Plus, she's giving herself bonus points for not whining when he pulls away. Her heart pounding like it's about to stroke out is okay: that's all on the inside. Semi-gasping for air is fine, too--Clint's a little out of breath and Darcy can plausibly blame the rest of hers on general adrenaline and all. She sits on her hands so they don't reach out and grab him. Needy is not what she's going for, and she bets he gets that a lot.

"You're right--it's the best thing I've heard in… fuck, since Nat tipped us off to this whole cluster," Clint is saying, and Darcy wrenches her brain around from kissing to spare a thought for how SHIELD imploding must have been playing out from the inside. 

"Yeah, Thor," Clint says, touching his throat mike again, "never mind that last part. Give me thirty seconds to drop a couple of Easter Eggs in on our guests and then feel free to hit them with as much juice as you want." He reaches back and pulls an arrow out of his quiver, but doesn't stand up. "Okay, Darce, straight up: how well can you see?"

"Um, better?" Darcy says. She blinks furiously and wishes for a pair of sunglasses, but she can open her eyes without being blinded by the sunlight now. "Don't ask me to read a screen and I'll be okay."

"Alright," Clint says, deadly serious enough that Darcy's heart starts tripping out again, and not for any kind of a fun, good reason like getting kissed. "This is what we're going to do—I'm standing up and dropping three arrows into the lab. When I tell you, you run for the road. You _run_ , okay?" He hands her a key fob, folding her hand around it when she's a half-beat slow in realizing what he's giving her. "The SUV is parked right over the top of the hill, you can't miss it. If I'm not right behind you, _right behind you_ , when you get there, get inside, lock it up, and call Foster's number. It's bouncing through Stark's AI; even if Thor isn't right on top of her, he'll get the call. The truck's one of Stark's--it's been bulletproofed twelve ways to Sunday; it'll hold out until Thor can get to you."

"Wait, what? No _way_ \--"

"Darcy," Clint says, kissing her one more time, hard and fast, and maybe a little desperate. "No discussion. _Please_."

"Okay," Darcy whispers, unable to keep from touching her fingers to her mouth. The 'please' is kinda unsettling; she's pretty damn sure Hawkeye doesn't make a habit of polite requests, but the alternative leads to contemplation of feelings that are entirely too deep for the moment. She scrambles up so she's sitting on her heels, ready to run, sending up big thanks to whichever deity watches over wardrobe choices, because jeans and Docs might not be the best for running, but they're a hell of a lot better than a skirt and unlaced (as in no laces at all) Chucks, which is what she's been wearing most of the past week.

"On my mark, Lewis," Clint says, back to the scary, serious tone. He stands up and draws in the same motion and before she's really even gotten her brain to count to three, he's saying, " _Now_ ," and she's up and running, praying that she doesn't trip and fall flat on her face. She can hear yelling from what sounds like the lab, but she doesn't let herself so much as turn her head to look back, just keeps her legs moving as fast as she can. 

It's probably not the best time to lecture herself for not really sticking with that Couch-To-5K deal she'd started after London, but she firmly resolves to be more responsible in the future. (She sees what her brain is doing there, pretending like she's not going to die on this stupid state highway that's not much more than a paved back road, but nobody ever said she wasn't overly optimistic.) She's halfway up the hill when the air around her crackles, the hair on her arms almost standing up from the static electricity. She knows that feeling, knows it means Thor is doing his thing, but there's never going to be enough warning for how terrifying it is when lightning comes down essentially right on top of you. She thinks she screams, but the thunder is so loud she can't hear herself, so she doesn't really worry about sounding like a wuss, just keeps running. 

Thor must be working some mighty ticked-off mojo, because he slams the lab three more times before Darcy makes it to the top of the hill and can see the SUV, right where Clint promised her it'd be. She staggers the last twenty yards, making herself run through the stitch in her side and somehow managing not to fall even when she stumbles over where the edge of the road is cracked and uneven. She's wired enough that she nearly drops the key fob, her hands are shaking so bad. Finesse is definitely not an option; she presses randomly on the buttons until she gets the little light flash that says the doors are unlocked. Only then does she let herself look back for Clint. 

Smoke is pouring up from the valley, dark and heavy, and a perfect backdrop for the split second of panic before Clint comes up and over the hill, moving backward at least as fast as Darcy had been going forward. (She really, really is going to do that Couch-to-5K after this. _Really_.) His bow is slung over his back and he's got a gun in each hand, firing steadily with both. Darcy's stupidly overactive brain doesn't let the fact that she can't see anything other than him stop it from supplying her with images of the guys who'd crashed into the lab, only now they're swarming up the hill after her and Clint. 

Even Clint's schtick about how he never misses is not at all comforting. 

"Don't freeze up on me now, darlin'," Clint calls, and Darcy realizes that's exactly what she's done and _dammit_ , she is not letting the bad guys win just because she's too stupid to move. _Shut it_ , Darcy tells her brain firmly, and scrambles up into the SUV, yanking her phone out and getting ready in case she has to call in reinforcements of the godly Asgardian type. Nothing crests the hill behind Clint, though, ( _See?_ Darcy tells her overactive imagination. _Hawkeye_.) and he makes it to the truck only a few seconds after Darcy.

"Good job," he says to her, pulling the door closed and then tossing his gun to the other hand so he can start the engine. "All parties, Hawkeye clear, and HYDRA neutralized," he says into his throat mic, backing down the road at what would be an unnerving speed even if he wasn't driving one handed and pointing the gun out the open window with the other. Darcy feels she is allowed the one little _meep_ as she scrabbles for the shoulder harness. Clint flashes her a cocky grin, which doesn't do anything but amp her adrenaline higher, but it's better than freaking out, and she finds herself returning it in kind. "I've got Darcy, Thor; you and the geeks get low and small." 

"I'm not exactly sure 'low and small' is in Thor's vocabulary," Darcy mutters, mostly because it's something to think about other than how the smoke is still pouring up from the valley and she knows the lab was the only thing big enough to burn like that. The important stuff got out--like, oh, Jane and the data and Darcy herself--but everything else is gone, toast. 

She takes a couple of slow, steady breaths (it doesn't hurt that Clint has finally decided it's okay to turn around, so at least they're driving forward, even if the speed has increased to something Darcy does not want to know for sure.) 

"You okay?" Clint glances over to her. "There's a bottle of water under the seat if you want."

"I--oh, holy shit, I appreciate the concern but seriously, I would feel an astronomical amount better if you'd look at the road rather than me." Darcy resists the urge to cover her eyes--she's not that much of a wuss, she tells herself sternly--and gropes around for the water. She doesn't think she's all that thirsty, at least not until the first swallow and she realizes how much dust and smoke and sand she's been breathing. 

"Easy," Clint says, but he's watching the road, so Darcy doesn't fuss. " _I'd_ really appreciate it if you didn't throw up in my truck, because it's looking like I'm gonna be living out of it for the foreseeable future." 

It's a totally reasonable request, so Darcy applies the slow-and-steady philosophy to drinking as well as breathing. "I'm okay," she says finally. It feels good to hear it, so she says it again. "I'm good--thanks." She drinks a little more water. "I'm pretty sure I'm never going to be happier to hear a familiar voice as I was back then."

"I will take any and all Best Ofs I can get," Clint says, "but I really was just doing my job."

"Yeah, well, take it from me, sometimes your job is pretty okay."

"Sometimes it is," Clint agrees, and it's all nice and warm and fuzzy there for a second, never mind that they're driving at high speed in what's basically a tank. Darcy's just thinking that it really is true what they say about how the human brain can get used to all kinds of weird things and reset previously unthought of craziness to baseline normal when a British voice comes out of nowhere, saying, "Agent Barton, we have intercepted a distress signal on SHIELD frequencies that is somewhat… unusual."

"Unusual how?" Clint says, and since he seems to be perfectly okay with voices popping up from nowhere, Darcy tells her adrenal glands to settle down and tries not to look like she just had a small heart attack. 

"It is broadcasting on the most tightly regulated of monitored frequencies, yet is originating from an area that holds no known SHIELD installations."

"Yeah, well, I don't think either of us will be shocked that Fury had more secrets than anybody knew officially," Clint answers. 

"No, indeed," Mr. Brit answers.

"And I'm guessing there's a reason you're telling me this other than you need somebody to roll your eyes with—do you roll your eyes?"

"Metaphorically."

"You're okay, Jarvis," Clint says. "Even if you are one of Stark's."

"I'm flattered, Agent Barton." He sounds pretty sincere, Darcy thinks, especially after all the underlying sarcasm of the rest of the conversation. "As for my reasons for contacting you, I have done so because you are the closest resource to the signal origination point and would therefore be the most likely candidate to effect any sort of assistance."

"Most likely?" Clint says. "Did we somehow get a bunch of new people we trust?"

"Unfortunately, no, we have not been able to vet any additional agents or analysts."

"So, you're really saying I'm it."

"Yes, I'm afraid I am." The Jarvis guy sounds a little stressed under his (very nice) accent. "I also am afraid that I can't provide any verification of the signal itself. "

Even Darcy can figure out that he means it could be a trap. Clint just shrugs.

"It's always something," he says. "Let me hear what you've got."

It all sounds like random beeps and clicks and static, but Clint listens closely. (He still doesn't slow down, but at least the road is smooth and mostly straight, so Darcy isn't too freaked.) He has Jarvis repeat it three times, and then says, "Yeah, I don't know either. It could legit be a lab that managed to hold out against the first assault, or it could be one more nasty trick up HYDRA's sleeve." He drums his fingers on the steering wheel. "Doesn't matter, though, I still have a civilian that I can't—"

" _No_ ," Darcy blurts out. "No, you can't just leave people to those… those… _them_. Just drop me off somewhere—"

"No," Clint says.

"But—"

" _No!_ " His shout echoes off the windows and hard edges of the car. Darcy can't help jumping a little at it.

"Fuck," Clint sighs. "I--sorry. I didn't mean to scare you."

"You didn't," Darcy says, and gives him as good of a smile as she can dredge up. It's the truth, too. Her heart's jackrabbitted back up, because of course it has (it's been a really long day, she's trying to give herself a break), but she isn't actually spooked. Just startled. "Pinkie swear. But thanks, apology accepted."

Clint drives on, his jaw set into his best stoneface (which is pretty impressive—Darcy is sure it's very helpful when he's being a super-agent-badass, but she misses the eye crinkles and the always-near-the-surface smirk.)

"How long has it been since you've slept?"

"Not long enough that I should be losing it like that." 

"Okay, fine. You're fine, I'm fine, your buddy Jarvis there is super-fine and everything is just groovy," Darcy snaps back, which is just stupid, because she is definitely smart enough to have figured out that admitting any kind of weakness is a super-agent no-no. "Look," she sighs, "As noted before, I appreciate the protective vibe you've got working, but I'm not anybody special. I'm not Jane. I don't know anything, not really, not enough for them to just ignore whoever else is out there in favor of me."

Clint drives for another little while, and then when he answers, his voice is flat. "Even if you don't know anything—which I don't buy, because you've been working with that data for years now, even if you don't understand the theory behind it—it doesn't matter. They don't know how much you know or don't know, and they're not going miss any possible loopholes." He glances over at her. "If I was running the op, I wouldn't leave you behind and I'm not willing to risk them being stupid enough to let anyone like you slip through the cracks."

"Which is an even better reason we shouldn't leave anyone else behind," Darcy snaps. It's not him she's mad at, which she probably isn't getting across, but it's a little bit of a surprise to find that she's actually more angry than scared. But, yeah, she is; she's _furious_ , and it might not be the smartest attitude she's ever copped, but it feels better than running scared does.

"Darlin'," Clint says, "I don't even know if anybody's there. I don't know if it's a set-up from the start or if I'd be walking in too late or--"

"But if it wasn't for me, you'd go," Darcy says. "You wouldn't even think twice about it." He doesn't answer, but he doesn't really have to. Darcy knows she's right. She just has to figure out how to translate everything she's feeling into words, just so he knows where she's coming from. "These guys—"

"HYDRA," Clint interrupts. "Let's be real clear on that. It's HYDRA, and they've been setting this up for decades. Since fucking World War II if what Nat's managed to tell me holds true."

"Okay," Darcy says, swallowing hard, because yeah, he's right, they do need to be clear on everything, and yeah, it's really freaking scary to think that HYDRA-- _HYDRA_ , for fuck's sake--is out there, but it's also part of her determination. "HYDRA, they came and blew into our lab and clearly, they really didn't care what they tore apart." She stops for another second, but it really pisses her off that people feel like they can just come and take things that they want, so there's only so much calm she can expect to find. "And you know, we had Thor--and you--so everything tilted in our favor, but--"

"Agent Barton," Jarvis says from the speakers. "The signal has changed from the electronic beacon to a human call."

"Patch it through," Clint says, and a woman's voice, sharp and crisp for all that Darcy can hear the strain underlying every word, comes through the speakers. She gets about five words into a string of numbers before Clint starts swearing viciously.

"I'm guessing that made sense to you," Darcy says. The woman is repeating herself and while Clint's stopped swearing, he really doesn't look happy. "Care to share with the rest of the class?"

After a couple of seconds of some impressive side-eye (Darcy knows he's usually a hell of a lot more subtle than this, but she will concede the trying times), Clint finally says, "There are about ten people in SHIELD who have clearances for those codes, and nothing she's saying is good." He drives without speaking for another few seconds, then says, "Lab facility, high-security, one active agent on the ground, about a third of the scientists turned, expecting hostile engagement before morning."

"Okay," Darcy says slowly, "so, at least we know there's someone still there?" 

"Yeah," Clint said. "We know that."

"And I'm guessing that if so few people know those codes, the ones who do… they all know each other."

"Yeah." Clint looks even less happy than before. "Yeah, I know her."

"So," Darcy says, when he doesn't say anything more, "Do you think she's HYDRA?"

"Yesterday, I would have said there was no way in hell, but today?" He's probably giving himself a migraine what with how hard he's grinding his teeth, but Darcy isn't stupid enough to tell him to chill. "I've got no fucking idea. I mean, yeah, some of this shit doesn't surprise me at all, not when I think about it, but Nat was naming some names that I would have taken a bullet for, no questions asked."

"Okay," Darcy says slowly. "I get that this sucks on all levels—" She probably doesn't really get it, not if she's honest with herself, but she'll save that conversation for later. "It's just—I can't _do_ anything, you know? I can run and hide--"

"You wiping those drives did more than you know."

"Yeah, well, me being the reason you're not helping those geeks isn't making me feel like anything but useless."

"Darce—"

"I'm serious." Darcy braces herself with one hand on the ceiling as he rockets them through a couple of curves. "If I hadn't been so slow in the lab, I would have been with Thor and you could go help--" Clint starts to interrupt but Darcy talks over him. "No, just listen. If I was with Thor, you'd be there—" She nods toward the radio "— _helping_ , already. Two minutes faster, two minutes less time fiddling with the stupid video feeds and I'd have been on the other side of the lab and _we wouldn't be having this conversation._ "

The last part is a little shrill. Maybe.

Okay, probably.

Darcy acknowledges that she might be right on the edge of losing it, and takes a second to chill.

"And I just don't think that my being slow should mean that a bunch of other people should—should—" She's trying her best to be calm and rational about this, but her brain cannot wrap itself around people _dying_ because of her cable news addiction.

"Hey," Clint says. "You weren't slow—you saved me having to go into your lab." Darcy shakes her head, because, yeah, okay, she did what she was supposed to do, but it still sucks. "You can't think in what-ifs, not in set-ups like this. If you're not right next to me, telling me you'd wiped the hard drives, making me stop and listen, I probably would have been all the way committed before I'd gotten the news, which means I'm fighting my way in and out and there's no telling what happens then. You have to keep focused on what is, not what could have been or you go nuts."

"We should still go," Darcy says, her voice stuck somewhere in her throat so the words come out a whisper. The agent on the radio is repeating her code again; when Darcy steals a glance at Clint, he's listening, too, and she can tell he's a lot less certain about not going than he's letting on. She's tempted to rush on and list all the reasons why he should go help, but a tiny-but-vocal part of her brain knows that pushing him is the exact wrong thing to do, so she somehow manages to keep her mouth shut.

"Jarvis," Clint sighs after an endless few seconds. "Show me the coordinates on that signal."

x - x - x 

The fact that Darcy never once feels like an idiot for not leaving well enough alone and getting the hell out of Dodge with her own personal superhero is, she decides, either a sign of emotional growth and maturity, or it's the final nail in the coffin of her sanity and good sense. Either way, she never once doubts her decision and it is what it is.

As far as Darcy can tell, it probably should have taken them a day to get up into the mountains where the signal's originating from; with Clint driving and the situation deteriorating (they lose the automatic beacon two hours into the drive and only manage to pick up occasional voice calls after that), they make it in five of the tensest hours Darcy's ever lived through. Clint spends the the time running through situational tactics with Jarvis, reviewing everything they can find about the area around the signal origination point. Since there is apparently heavy Stark Industries involvement here, Darcy isn't too surprised to hear that there's a fleet of drones that Jarvis can divert in order to give them up-to-the-minute eyes on the ground. 

Darcy keeps herself busy with all the news outlets and trying to figure out what's real and what's just being fed to them. Surprisingly enough, the level of obfuscation seems lower than expected, but maybe that's because everybody's been caught with their pants down, so to speak. Yeah, SHIELD had apparently been a front for HYDRA, but none of the other alphabet agencies had noticed either. All of them are scrambling and nobody's got their talking points straight.

"Jeez, Stewart and Colbert are gonna have a field day with this," Darcy murmurs, flicking through the first dozen photos reddit's put together of the world's leaders and Alexander Pierce. "He suckered _everybody_." Clint might just be pretending to listen to her in order to keep her from freaking out, but she can't help but engage with everything that's happening and all the implications that are going to be playing out for decades. 

It keeps her distracted, at least until they get to where they're going and Clint takes her phone away from her and says, "I need to know you're hearing me, Darce," and it all sort of crashes down on her, everything that she's gotten herself into. It's scary as fuck, Darcy is not going to deny that, but she still doesn't see how she could have made a different choice. 

"Jarvis is going to be monitoring everything on the ground. If things start going to shit, your only job is to get to where he tells you to go." 

Darcy opens her mouth--she's been expecting something like this and she hates that all she can really do is run and hide--but all the arguments she's marshalled wilt under the seriousness in Clint's eyes. 

"I can take care of myself," Clint tells her quietly, "but I can do it a hell of a lot better if I know you're taking care of you." 

_Right_ , Darcy tells herself. _Really not the time for delusions of grandeur._ She nods and Clint's breath sighs out, like he's been braced for an argument. 

"Nothing stupid," Darcy promises. She can't help thinking about some of the video from Manhattan, though, and adds, "I'm guessing this isn't really in your job description, but my guilt complex would like to ask for at least a nanosecond of consideration before you throw yourself off anything bigger than this truck."

Clint smirks at her (which is good, because she really seriously does not want him wasting brain cells on her, and making wisecracks seemed to be the best way to convince him she's not completely freaked out) and then plugs a cell phone into the console and says, "Okay, here we go. I need you quiet--I don't want anyone who might be listening in to know you're even here."

Darcy nods, and he taps the phone to start. The call connects after barely one ring, but no one says anything. 

"Heya, Birdie," Clint says, easy and relaxed, like he's not tucking knives in his boots and checking clips in a fairly scary number of guns. "You remember that one time in Marrakesh?"

There's a long few seconds of silence from the phone and then a woman's voice--Darcy recognizes her from the intercepted radio calls--says, "Hawk, I swear to God, if you're--if this is a set-up, I will rip your lungs out."

"Right back atcha, babe," Clint answers. 

"Fuck, I hate this," the woman says, her voice low and rough. Darcy hears her take a deep breath, and when she continues, she's back to the brisk, no-nonsense tone. "Usual signal to start?"

"You got it," Clint says, and flicks off the phone.

"'Birdie?'" Darcy asks, once she's sure it's okay to talk. " _'Babe?'_ Who knew those were acceptable greetings for SHIELD agents?"

"Only the ones I used to be married to," Clint says with a semi-rueful shrug. Before Darcy can wrap her brain around _that_ little tidbit of backstory enough to figure out an answer, he's saying, "Jarvis, whatever you can do to knock out communications in and out of this area would be a plus in my book."

"I will endeavor to assist in any way," Jarvis said. Clint nods and turns to Darcy.

"Do not fuck around with this, Darce." He pulls on fingerless leather gloves and reaches for the wrap-around sunglasses on the dash. "If Jarvis says to go, you _go_."

"I will," Darcy promises, her voice stuck somewhere in her throat. 

"Breathe, darlin'," he says, and he's out the door and gone. She wishes her brain was functioning better so she could have come up with some kind of a line to send him off with, she'll just have to think of something for when he comes back. The silence surrounds her, the SUV tucked away off the road and half-hidden behind a stand of trees just starting to bud, and it's just fucking _creepy_ , Darcy decides.

"Okay," Darcy says out loud to herself. "Breathe."

She counts to a hundred and then counts down again and the creep factor fades into what feels a lot like boredom. She finds herself assuming that the quiet is because Clint, et al have yet to have kicked things into gear, but then she remembers the bow slung across his back and has to resist the urge to smack herself for being stupid. Not really knowing what's going on makes it ridiculously hard to sit and wait quietly -- not that doing anything quietly is Darcy's strong suit in the first place. Clearly, Clint and his (holy _shit_ ) ex-wife of an agent have some plan in mind (evidently Marrakech was memorable, Darcy's not sure if she really wants to know), and Darcy gets that the fewer people who know about it, the better, but she has no idea if she should be bracing for an explosion or settling in for the rest of the day.

"Breathe," Darcy repeats. "Just br--oh, fuck that." She stares at the dashboard thoughtfully. It, of course, looks like the cockpit of a fighter jet or something, with a zillion buttons and monitors. "Um, Mr. Jarvis?"

"Yes, Ms. Lewis?" The answer is prompt and… courteous, for lack of a better word, enough so that Darcy doesn't feel too bad about interrupting whatever it is he might be doing.

"If you're monitoring things, is there anything exciting going on?"

"Not at this precise moment, but I believe all maneuvering has been accomplished and the more, er, action-oriented events will begin shortly." 

"If it's not too much of a hassle, could you let me know what's going on? I'm already going stir-crazy and it hasn't been even an hour."

"If you would like, I can stream the video content I am receiving from a stationary drone to your location." Jarvis hesitates, and Darcy gets the feeling he's trying not to insult her. "This would be an unfiltered feed, so I cannot predict what you might see."

That's about as tactful of a statement as Darcy's ever heard, but she knows what he's saying. She chews on her bottom lip while she considers her response. Bad shit is probably about to happen and knowing that is one thing, but watching it live is something else. 

"I want to see," Darcy says finally. "I swear I won't fall apart on you or do anything stupid."

"I would not have offered video capabilities if I believed that you would in any way compromise the operation," Jarvis says, and Darcy is touched, she thinks. "I am more concerned for your emotional well-being should matters take a turn for the worse. Violence is never an easy thing to witness."

"Oh," Darcy says, and she really _is_ touched, "I—think I need to see what happens. But, thank you."

The screen set into the dashboard flickers and comes to life. It takes Darcy a little bit to figure out what she's seeing, but she finally works out the straight-down view she's getting from the drone. It's a wide-angle view, so things look little and distant, but the picture quality is ridiculously good, so Darcy actually can see a lot of detail. The SHIELD facility is tucked into a notch about halfway up the mountain. There's a building, but from the angle of the drone camera, Darcy can see where it runs right into the mountain. The road winds down to a flat area in the front, but otherwise it's nothing but trees and rocks and lots and lots of hiding places.

"We will also be able to monitor audio communications," Jarvis says, but Darcy can't hear anything, not even Clint breathing. She's trying to figure out what the 'usual signal' might be when something flickers on the screen. It's there and gone and Darcy's just decided that she'd imagined it when it happens again. On the third time, she manages to see that it's an arrow, but only because she sees the extra flicker that's the guy it hit dropping like a stone. 

"Oh," Darcy can't help whispering, because it's still dead quiet, and she'd thought she'd understood before, but now she _understands_ why Clint likes arrows. She is also kinda getting why Jarvis was worried about her, because her brain is in overdrive, skipping around trying to figure out how she's supposed to feel watching it all happen. It's not like the Destroyer or London or even Manhattan--those were so big and overwhelming that the crazy overran everything else. This, though, watching people go down one at a time, in complete silence, it's sobering and scary, visceral and impossible to ignore. 

Darcy thinks she sees two more arrows on the feed, and she's still wondering about the signal, whatever it might be, when she hears Clint take a deep breath and that's all the warning she gets before things get crazy. She's sort of subconsciously figured out (from the trajectory of the arrows) that Clint has to be pretty high up where the mountain starts really climbing, but she isn't expecting him to flip down to land in front of the building, right out in the open, and yeah, he's shooting (guns this time, one in each hand, and she jumps a little at hearing them live as well as through the audio feed) before he even hits the ground, but there are suddenly a lot of people shooting back at him and the bunch of rocks he ducks behind really doesn't look all that great as cover. Darcy has no idea how this could possibly be a good idea, much less a _plan_ , but then someone is shooting from inside the SHIELD building and she realizes that everybody firing at Clint just gave the person inside an idea of where to aim. She still doesn't see how it's a good idea, but it's maybe not as crazy as she thought. 

Of course, a split second later, Darcy is regretting she ever even thought that, because Clint steps out from behind his little bit of cover, bow drawn and arrow nocked, shooting in one fluid motion. The arrow arches up, almost straight toward the drone and its camera before it flashes once and explodes, and the screen whites out from the brightness. Darcy's eyes squinch shut reflexively—apparently Hawkeye looooves his flash-bangs—but then snap back open at the ungodly increase in shooting.

"Jarvis?" Darcy manages to make her voice sound not totally freaked, about which she is super-proud, because the screen she's watching is still blanked out from the flash, but the audio is working and it sounds like an all-out firestorm. "Um, are we still okay?"

"Sensors coming back online," Jarvis answers her, calm and collected, which is, Darcy isn't going to lie, more than a little reassuring, because she doesn't think he'd care about her viewing pleasure if something bad had happened to everyone else. He's not just fobbing her off, either; the screen flickers and comes back up, just as clear as before. Darcy's heart skips a couple of beats at the sight of Clint still upright and okay, and then skips another couple when her eyes and brain get together long enough to confirm that it's Clint and who Darcy is assuming is the other SHIELD agent making most of the noise, standing back-to-back, moving in a slow, careful rotation to cover a full 360 degrees, all hands fully occupied with seriously scary-looking guns. 

_Reload_ , Clint's saying, just barely loud enough that Darcy can hear over the gunshots. _On my mark._

_On your mark, copy,_ the woman answers, not looking away from where she's shooting.

_Mark_ , Clint says and drops. Darcy suddenly doesn't care so much about getting the gunshots both live and over the audio feed, because if she had just seen him go down like that without having heard him saying things, she would have assumed he'd been shot. By the time she manages to think that through, though, he's finished flipping magazines in and out of (all) of his guns, and is back up shooting again. Darcy resists the urge to rub her eyes and firmly refuses to think about how much experience he must have at getting shot at. 

It takes one more round of reloading, but they finally ease off and stand quietly in the middle of hundreds of shiny bullet casings. Nobody shoots them, and Darcy is semi-mollified that they're at least breathing heavily. 

_High cover?_ Clint asks. The other agent nods once, and Clint goes straight up the front face of the building. Once he gets on the roof and stops moving, it's hard for Darcy to pick him out in the shadows. _Set,_ he murmurs. _Still running like Marrakesh._

_In more ways than one,_ the other agent says as she's turning to the door and motioning whoever's inside to come out.

_Here we go,_ Clint mutters, and Darcy finds herself holding her breath again. A line of people start edging out of the door, the first two of them helping a third who isn't putting any weight on one leg. Darcy's just counted seven people, none of them with the confidence of the agents she's met, when she sees the now-familiar flicker of an arrow leaving Clint's bow. _J,_ he's saying, _Keep an extra eye out for me. The way my luck's been running this week, there's no way we took everyone out with that volley._

"Monitoring," Jarvis replies, but, based on the second arrow that Darcy sees, she thinks Clint is doing pretty okay on his own. The rest of the SHIELD people are moving as quickly as they can while being plastered against the side of the mountain across from where Darcy knows Clint is. Even aside from the person who can't walk, the rest of them don't look like they're doing so hot. They clearly haven't had an easy time of it; Darcy can't stop her brain from playing out all kinds of nasty scenarios, and she is once again incredibly grateful for her team of super-hero guardians. 

"There but for the grace of Thor and Hawkeye," she mutters. She doesn't know if she'd have had the guts to leave a sheltered place and step out into the SHIELD/HYDRA version of the OK Corral, but maybe it had been bad inside, too, because they're all making steady progress toward the next notch in the mountainside and the road that presumably leads to the SUV and Darcy. They're almost all there when the lady SHIELD agent (Darcy refuses to call her 'Birdie' even in her head) takes two steps forward and starts shooting up and across the open space. 

_Ah, hell,_ Clint mutters, and adds his gun to hers. _J?_ , he asks. 

_Thermal imaging shows two hostiles in the tree cover,_ Jarvis answers, _with additional support in progress._

Darcy does not like the sound of that, but at least she doesn't think anyone's been hurt yet. The group has disappeared off the edge of the drone's camera field, and the lady agent is almost out of sight, too. That just leaves Clint on his stupid roof.

_How much time do we have?_ Clint asks.

_Approximately two-point-three minutes,_ Jarvis answers.

_Birdie?_ Clint calls.

_Clear_ , comes the answer. _We still playing like Marrakesh?_

_You know it,_ Clint says, and Darcy can just make out him switching out the rifle for his bow. Darcy is really going to have a conversation with him about his disturbing love for the thing. She accepts that he's the best with it, and that it's his go-to thing, and--based on the sudden weird fog that's spreading over the little valley, killing all visibility--that it's pretty handy, but using it against lots of big guns still does not make any kind of sense to her. He's apparently been hanging out with Iron Man--surely Stark Industries could make him something a little more technologically advanced?

Before she can really map out any kind of strategy for said discussion (and yes, she realizes even thinking about something so ridiculous means she's probably close to losing her grip on things, but she hasn't fallen apart yet and she is totally fine with whatever her brain needs to do to keep it together), people start straggling around the edge of the hill and into Darcy's actual view. The SUV is back off the road far enough that none of them see it--or her--at least not until the other agent comes into view. She knows right where to look. Darcy can't decide if that's good (because really, who wants all these people out running around for longer than they need to be?) or a little disturbing (because all of Darcy's no-really-everything-is-cool-and-nobody-knows-I'm-even-here just evaporates.) 

It turns out okay, though, because Clint makes the turn himself before anyone even gets up close enough to realize there's a person behind the tinted windows, and that's enough reassurance for Darcy to keep calm when he tells Jarvis to unlock the doors and stand by. It's going to be a tight fit, getting everyone in, but it's not like they have any other options.

"You shoot," the other agent says to Clint as she directs her people into the back of the SUV, holding the injured woman for last and lifting her in to lie across the laps of the people in the middle row seats. "I'll drive."

"Just like old times," Clint says, going over the hood of the SUV in a one-handed vault to come around to the passenger side. Darcy takes the hint and just barely manages to get herself onto the console seat before he comes in through the open window and the other agent is putting the engine in gear before she's even really in the door. 

Darcy hangs over the back of her little jump seat and takes her life in her hands by letting go of being braced so she can point with one hand. "There's a regional medical center disguised as a first aid kit under the middle seat," she says. The woman who's hurt is pale and sweating and there's a smear of fresh, bright red on the bandage wrapped around the thigh of her sensible khaki slacks. Darcy doesn't expect much from her, but the rest of them are a little slow on the uptake, too. "There," Darcy says again, leaning further over so they get her meaning. She's really not excited by the possibility of someone bleeding out a foot away from where she's sitting, but one of the older men finally hears her and starts fumbling the duffel bag out, and another one sits up to help him. 

Darcy is still tempted to climb back and deal with it herself, but then it turns out that it's not just Clint who drives like a crazy adrenaline junkie (she has a brief thought of his-and-hers obstacle courses and the havoc wreaked upon them) so she needs both hands to keep from being thrown like a rag doll.

" _Sit_ ," Clint tells her, and it's that tone that has Darcy moving before she even thinks about it. "Belt in."

It's not an unreasonable suggestion, so Darcy ignores the clipped tone and does what he says. The console seat barely has room for even her short legs, but it's not like there's any space in the back, not with seven people in various stages of hyperventilation, shock, and bleeding, plus all of Clint's gear spilling over from the cargo area. It's the biggest SUV Darcy's seen, but it's still packed full, so she just tries to wedge herself in and get the seat belt fastened.

At least this particular agent is starting off going forward. It's a low bar, but Darcy is super-happy to have passed it, even if she does have to close her eyes and brace her hands on the roof as they go flying toward and just barely around a curve in the road that has mountains on one side and (really) sheer drop on the other. They take it at speed, smoothly enough that she opens her eyes way earlier than she'd expected to. The lady agent is still watching her with a frown.

"I'm fine," Darcy assures her, and she's only a little breathless. "Really. I just passed my quota for high-speed driving for the year today. You know. Hours and hours with Barton will do that to you." Darcy shrugs, Clint snorts, and the lady agent smiles. "Oh, do you have a name? He calls you 'Birdie', which is just not working in my brain right now." Darcy's back to babbling, but again: long day. 

"You can pick from Mockingbird or Agent 19; is either one of them better?" The agent sounds vaguely amused, which, given her skill with a gun, is probably not the worst reaction Darcy could have provoked. "Sorry, but let's just stick with call signs right now."

Darcy's about to answer--and introduce herself--when the screen on the dashboard starts beeping and flashing. Darcy would totally call bullshit on the timing, but Clint stabs at the touch screen with one finger and says, "Three heat signatures coming right at us," and Darcy supposes she can blame it all on HYDRA.

"Cowboy up," Mockingbird says, flipping a pair of sunglasses down out of her (long, blonde, ridiculously attractive) hair. Clint's already moving, halfway back out of the window, a rifle with a giant scope in his hands. "Everybody get low," she announces, tilting her head up so Darcy can tell she's meeting people's eyes in the rear-view mirror. "Especially you," she says, turning to Darcy. Darcy can feel her watching her, like she's waiting for Darcy to freak out, but honestly, it's been A Day and Darcy's freak-out center is all out of energy, so she just nods and unbuckles her seat belt so she can scrunch down below the dashboard.

"Here we go," Clint calls from outside the window, calm and level even as the wind is tearing the sound of his voice away. "Keep it steady and at speed."

"I _have_ done this before," Mockingbird answers, but without heat. Darcy can't see much of anything from where she's curled down on the floor, but she can tell from the flex of the other woman's thigh muscles that they're probably going faster, and if she turns her head the other way, she gets the same view, the flex and bunch of (seriously awesome--Jesus, but her brain is inappropriate sometimes) leg muscles as Clint keeps himself from falling out of the damn SUV.

Before Darcy's brain can twist itself up in this latest mess she's gotten herself into, there are three quick pops and Clint's saying, "Okay, we're good." He slides back so he's mostly inside. 

"You want me to ease off so you can make su--" Mockingbird asks, but Clint shakes his head, short and sharp, and she stops.

"We're good," he repeats. "Just keep driving." 

There's a little twist in Darcy's stomach at how quickly and smoothly it all happened. Her legs haven't even had time to get cramped and it's all done. And… she really needs to face up to what 'it' is--Clint's face, serious and all but shutdown, tells her he has, and so does Mockingbird's sober nod. After all the bullets and arrows from before, she's not sure why these last three shots are such a big deal, but they are. It's not even like she thinks there was any chance that HYDRA was going to let them drive off into the sunset without exchanging unpleasantries, or that they had much of a choice. It's just… unnerving. 

"You okay?" Clint's looking down at her with an unreadable expression on his face. Darcy nods firmly, because no matter how shaky, she _is_ fine, and he doesn't need to be worrying about her right now. 

With a little uncoordinated flailing accompanied by some undignified and awkward wriggling, Darcy starts getting herself back up out of the footwell. Clint reaches down and offers her an arm up, one that she takes gratefully. His hand is warm and steady, and Darcy manages not to be clingy, but the little extra squeeze he gives her before he lets go is almost enough to make her cry. 

_That_ isn't happening, though, because she pushed for this, and she _will_ deal. She flops herself back onto the console seat and pulls the seat belt around her while she twists around and makes sure everybody else is okay. It's the surest way she knows how to keep her brain from freaking out when reality isn't exactly keeping up its end of the non-surreal bargain. 

Other than halfway pulling a muscle in her side reaching and twisting for where Clint has the case of water stashed, it works out okay. (It says something about her life that, in a day filled with more shooting than a summer movie, the closest she comes to getting hurt is because she can't stretch worth a damn. Darcy mentally adds yoga to her C25K resolution.) Everybody in the back is metaphorically clinging to their composure by the last few millimeters of their chipped and broken nails, but nobody's lost it yet. 

She isn't sure how much longer that's going to last, but at least they're out of the figurative frying pan and they don't seem to have fallen into the traditional accompanying fire. It's not paradise, but it's probably better than anyone had a right to expect. Darcy decides she's just going to have to be okay with that. 

x - x - x 

The frying pan/fire analogy keeps worming its way into Darcy's brain. They manage to keep out of the fire, but it's getting more than a little hot, regardless. Nobody seems to be following them, but they can't contact anyone for a safe harbor. They stop and let everyone out to walk and stretch, let Clint and Mockingbird swap out driving, but there are too many people in the SUV and they're all mentally and physically exhausted. Everything takes three times as long to explain and ten times as long to get happening. Darcy finally gives up on staying belted in and half-climbs over the seat so she can help with the pressure bandage on the lady with the gunshot in her thigh. She's pale and sweating, and Darcy doesn't like how hard it is to feel her pulse reliably enough to count. 

There's a wordless conversation going on in the front seat when Darcy gets settled back into her (getting tinier every second) console seat, one that Clint doesn't seem at all happy about. 

"I'm just sayin'," he's muttering, glancing in the rearview mirror and drumming his fingers against the steering wheel, all of which Darcy reads as tiny stress tells. "They're--"

"Yeah, they're mercs," Mockingbird interrupts. "Right about now, I'm not seeing where that's much of a drawback." Clint shrugs. "Look, I get it, this is--" She shakes her head. "I don't even know what this whole thing is. Jesus, Hawk, _HYDRA_?" Her voice is bleak, but then, even in the low light thrown by the dashboard, Darcy can see her mouth firming in determination. "Those are my people back there, _mine_. This is the best course of action I can figure out for them."

They drive in silence for a while, Darcy putting up her best 'I'm-not-here-don't-mind-me' attitude, until Clint sighs. "You're not wrong," he finally says. "It's all down to who you trust right now. Make the call."

Mockingbird nods and taps out something on her phone, watching it intently for a few minutes, and then leaning over Darcy to show it to Clint. He nods once and takes the phone from her, setting it on the dash and using it like a GPS, taking them down a series of increasingly smaller roads, the headlights all but swallowed by the deep night even before he flips them off and navigates by moonlight until they roll to a stop in a narrow field between the foothills of the mountains. 

Clint keeps the car under tree cover, and once he kills the engine, tells everyone to sit tight while he and Mockingbird go assess the situation. There's grumblings and mutterings from the back of the SUV, which he silences with a low, snarled, "You want to go walk out into an ambush, that's your problem, but since that would tip off any bad guys that the rest of us are here, I'm more than willing to lock this whole thing down until we see what's up."

Everyone shuts up at that (Darcy's watching and it's really just one, youngish guy who's doing most of the complaining.) Clint lets the silence draw out to an uncomfortable length, which makes his point, and then he and Mockingbird slip out and… disappear. It's pretty impressive, and, if her life hadn't been in a ridiculous amount of danger, Darcy would be fascinated with how they blend themselves into the shadows and trees.

People are just starting to get restless when Clint and Mockingbird show back up, materializing out of the darkness as smoothly as they'd disappeared, and decide it's okay for people to leave the SUV. Darcy's happy everyone else is happy (and also _really_ happy she can get out of the (now way too tiny) console seat), but she finds herself climbing right back into the back of the SUV. Among other, more theoretical (and mostly useless) topics, Darcy has become an expert on layering up to keep warm in the desert/mountain nights while Jane is discovering crazy new physics theories, and she knows how quickly the chill can set in if you don't take it seriously. She makes sure the lady who's hurt is wrapped up warmly, raiding Clint's stash of the shiny space blankets and sealing them around her with duct tape.

There isn't much she can do, and she's not sure if the woman is even aware of the world around her, but she's very aware of how easily it could have been Jane (or herself) instead. At the very least, Darcy can be there with her. 

"That's nice of you to look out for her," a voice says, and Darcy looks up to see the trouble-making young guy. "You don't even know her."

Darcy's more than a little irritated—like, seriously, she's only going to help someone because she has a personal relationship with them? _Really?_ —but is too tired to do anything but shrug. Mr. Charming keeps going with an increasingly ridiculous mix of flattery and the kind of flirting that's based in the theory that he just has to indicate he's interested and the subject of said interest will fall all over herself to land him. 

Right as Darcy's self-control is about at its limit and she's seconds away from either laughing or spitting in the guy's face, she hears a helicopter and Clint does his fade-in-from-the-darkness routine and materializes right next the SUV.

"Showtime," he says, his mouth tight. He looks at Darcy and tips his head toward the front seat, and Darcy realizes he's still not entirely sure that calling in whoever Mockingbird called in was the right move, and _that_... that is really goddamn unsettling. She nods once and crawls up over the console, settling herself behind the wheel, and Clint slams the back door closed. She sees the insulted look on her would-be Romeo's face but she can't really even enjoy it because Clint is walking out to stand next to Mockingbird and her stomach is doing back-flips at all the bad things that could happen. 

A big, military-looking helicopter settles onto the valley floor, rotors flattening the grass and sending branches and debris flying. Darcy can see shadowy figures inside and more than a few guns. Given all the firepower and the fact that they don't kill the engine even when they're fully on the ground, she's guessing that they're as keyed up about who to trust as everyone else. It pretty much seems like a recipe for a hair-trigger disaster and she has to remind herself to breathe--passing out isn't going to help anyone--as two of the shadows step out of the helicopter. 

There's a brief consultation and then Mockingbird is waving her people forward and Clint's leading the people from the helicopter back to the SUV. 

"Oh, very badass," Darcy mutters as the four professionals wander around with a casual disregard for the rotors and everyone else (including Mr. Full-of-Himself) is ducking and shielding their face. She'd totally wave farewell to him (with her middle finger, natch) but the back door is opening and Clint's climbing in to hand the injured lady out to the guy from the helicopter. Even with presumably having okayed each other, the woman from the helicopter stays back with her hand on the gun in her thigh holster. 

"Hello, luv," the helicopter guy says as he leans in and catches sight of Darcy. He has a nice voice with a British accent and if Darcy's stomach hadn't been informing her that it could very easily throw up from the tension, she probably would have at least smiled at him. As it is, she basically just lets her hair hide her face and nods a little. "You coming with us, too?" he asks.

" _No._ " Darcy's shaking her head before he's even finished. She deliberately doesn't look at Clint--she doesn't know what he thinks, but if it's up to her, she's not going with people she's never seen before, not now.

"All right, then," Helicopter Guy says as Clint helps him settle the injured woman in his arms. "You stay safe, you hear?"

He nods once to Clint and turns around without saying anything, crossing back over to the helicopter with the other woman alert and obviously on guard. They barely get back on board before the pilot has them lifting off. 

Clint's phone buzzes; after one quick look at Darcy that she translates as a warning to stay quiet, he flicks it on. 

"Thanks for the assist," Mockingbird says. Darcy can barely hear her voice over the sound of the helicopter. "I owe you one."

"Nah, c'mon, you know it's always a good time, tearin' things up with you," Clint answers, and she laughs a little, like she can't believe she's having the conversation. Darcy can relate. "You watch your back, Birdie."

"Ditto," she says and the line goes dead. The noise from the helicopter fades into the distance and Darcy is suddenly aware that she's so tired she can barely hold her head up. She drops her face down into her hands and tries to remember how to breathe.

"You okay over there?" 

"Holy shit," Darcy says, her voice very faint and not at all competent-sounding, dammit. "Did I really just ride along with the cavalry?"

"Not done yet, darlin'." Under the easy tone, Clint sounds exhausted, and Darcy tells her brain to suck it up. When she looks up, they're moving, but without the headlights, so it's pitch black. There's some kind of a night-vision filter over the windshield, though, all very Stark and sleek. "We just need to get away from here--last known location--and then we can find someplace to hole up for the night and get some sleep."

"Sleep would be amaaaazing," Darcy says, "and I'm pretty sure I'm at least a night ahead of you." 

"Yeah, it's been a while," Clint admits. Darcy is tempted to ask, but then decides she doesn't really have any perspective given that she gets cranky if she gets less than seven solid hours of sleep.

"All right, J, tell me when I'm being stupid," Clint says, tapping one of the gazillion touch screens on the dashboard. Darcy half-dozes while Jarvis offers his opinion on the various strategies Clint proposes; in the end, they decide that the advanced defensive capabilities of the SUV trump the less than awesome sleeping arrangements. Darcy is tired enough not to care, especially when the magic cargo area yields blankets and a surprisingly comfy pillow. 

"Oh," she says, her brain suddenly coming alive even as the rest of her is almost unconscious. "Jarvis went quiet because you didn't want anybody to know he was around." 

"Too many people I didn't know," Clint mumbles from the nest he's made in the back. "Had trust issues even before this cluster."

"Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you," Darcy slurs, and falls asleep to Clint's quiet laugh.

x - x - x 

The sun rises too damn early.

Darcy's always been of this opinion, and this particular morning does nothing to change her mind. On the bright side, they're not far from the interstate, and the truck stops are all open 24/7, so they get serious coffee and giant egg and cheese and sausage biscuits almost before Darcy's awake. After the day before and all the nerves and general insanity, plus the 'joy' of military MREs eaten on the crazy drive, Darcy practically inhales two of them. 

"Darlin'," Clint says, looking a little awed. Darcy tries not to preen. Whatever else he's going to say gets put on hold as his phone rings. Darcy does her silent routine, but he only answers and then hands the earpiece/microphone setup to Darcy. She takes it in that automatic way that you do when someone is holding something out to you, and fumbles the earpiece in. 

"Darcy? Darcy?" Jane's voice comes tumbling out of the silence, distant and far away but otherwise normal. Darcy manages not to screech in relief and excitement, but there's still a crazy jumble of _ohmygodohmy **god**_ s and _whenthelabexploded--_ s and _I'mfineI'mfine_ s and _areyouokay_ s.

Maybe it's just that it's been a ridiculous 24 hours and that she's still really drained from everything, but Darcy is way more emotional about re-connecting with Jane than she would have expected, and she somehow ends up holding onto Clint's hand while they sort things out.

"Erik's okay, too," Jane reports. "Well. Not _okay_ , but he's with us, at least for now. He's going back to London." Darcy makes a thoughtful noise—it would be nice to have Erik around, but at the same time, she wants him to feel safe. "Darcy," Jane's saying, all serious, "There's nothing left at the lab."

"Yeah," Darcy answers. "I had a front row seat." She doesn't want to think about all of Jane's equipment, the stuff she'd built from the ground up, all of it probably slag. She reminds herself that at least they got all the data out. And, y'know, themselves, too.

"I've been talking with some people," Jane says, still serious enough that Darcy wrenches her attention around. "And… I'm pretty sure I'm going to take an offer from Stark Industries for a lab."

"Wow," Darcy says, blinking at Clint, because it's only been a day. Jane doesn't usually dither, but this is still pretty fast. "Um, where?"

"I can't tell you," Jane answers, and Darcy's brain stutters to a frozen halt. She knows she's not the greatest looking assistant on paper--there's that whole thing about how she only has three-quarters of a degree, and not even one that's in the sciences, but she'd thought she'd managed things well enough that it wouldn't matter--

"Darcy," Jane's saying. "Darcy, listen, I know this isn't what you signed on for, so if you want to do something else, I got them to promise they'll find something for you in one of their locations, any one you want."

"That's, um--" Darcy starts, but Jane isn't finished.

"And it's good that they're serious about security, but I'm not sure how they expect you to make a decision without knowing where you'd be going if you stayed with me at the new lab--" There's more, but Darcy loses it track of it all in the sudden flood of emotion from both hearing that Jane still wants her on the job and, even more, at just how much that means to Darcy herself. She's been holding onto Clint's hand the whole time; now her grip is so tight her own knuckles hurt.

"I--" Darcy stops and takes a deep breath. She's a half-second away from crying, and that's just not how she wants to start this day, let alone a new lab set-up. She breathes in one more time, and then manages to find an almost normal tone. "Okay," she says. "I get that you can't talk on account of The Man, so cough twice if it's the observatory in Hawaii."

"Darcy," Jane sighs in exasperation, which is about a thousand times better than the super-serious, stressed-out tone she'd had before. Darcy grins triumphantly and Clint rolls his eyes.

Wins all around.

x - x - x 

"Oh, god, I don't know if I can do this," Darcy says, skidding to a halt in front of the "lingerie" section of big box store they've found. There had been some sort of secret-agent-code exchange between Clint, Thor, and the guys flying the plane that's supposed to take them to the new lab where they'd set a time and place for adding Darcy to the flying circus, which had left her with three hours, less the time it was going to take to get to the airfield, to get some semblance of her life back in order. Considering that she'd had to forage in the SUV for a toothbrush (fortunately, whoever had sent Clint off had done a bang-up job of provisioning so she'd even had a choice of (new, still-sealed) colors), she's really trying not to be too high-maintenance here. Someone had been looking out for her--not only had there been a second-hand store that had popped up on the GPS, but they'd actually had a couple of skirts and sweaters that fit (it doesn't matter where they actually go, they'll be out in the middle of the night--Darcy can never have too many sweaters, even if it _is_ Hawaii, which it probably won't be, not with Darcy's luck.) Those, plus the jeans she's been wearing, are at least a start. The cart Clint's pushing/leaning on is half-full now--t-shirts (boring, middle-America blandness, but easy to mix into things with more style) and a pair of running shoes (she is totally fucking serious about the Couch-to-5K and her Docs are not going to help there) and shampoo and a hair dryer--and really, all she needs is the basics, but the sight of all those plain, serviceable, ugly bras is maybe more than she can take.

"Um?" Clint says intelligently. 

"Please do not tell me you haven't seen decent lingerie," Darcy sniffs. "I've met both your partner _and_ your ex-wife now, I won't believe you even if you do." She flips through the selection and tries not to cry when she thinks about all the nice stuff that had gotten caught in the crossfire, so to speak. It's stupid to worry about underwear, with everything else that had been lost, but it's one more reason to hate HYDRA. 

"We can go see if there's someplace else--" Clint starts, but Darcy waves him off.

"No, I'm fine." She manages to find a couple of bras that are her size, in a brand she knows will fit, and turns to survey the rest of the selection. It's not exciting, but it's not utterly hopeless either, and she ends up cleaning them out of their French-cut bikinis, twenty-four pairs in all. Clint arches an eyebrow at the double armful she drops into the shopping cart, and she shrugs. "In all the years I've been with Jane, the only time we've had a decent laundry situation was when we were crashing with her mother. I can fake it with a lot of things, but not this."

"Not arguing," Clint says, and follows after her when she suddenly remembers that she needs something to pack all this crap into and takes off across the store.

x - x - x 

The airport they're supposed to meet the plane at is out in the middle of nowhere (such a surprise, Darcy thinks) and only barely deserves the name. It has two runways that look like they could have originally been someone's driveway, and a tiny shoe box of a building that houses the offices and a pair of thankfully functional bathrooms. For all that, it's pretty busy, with small, corporate-sized jets and propeller plans that look like crop dusters taking off and landing in a steady stream. Darcy doesn't know if that's a good thing or not--she half-flinches at the noise every time a plane takes off--but Clint doesn't seem twitchy so she tells her nerves to chill and lets Clint boost her up so she can sit on the hood and stockpile the fresh air before she has to get on the plane and breathe the reused stuff.

"Time check," she says, downing the last of the extra coffee the waitress at lunch had loaded them up with.

"We've got about fifteen minutes," Clint says, glancing at his phone. He drains his cup, too, and, taking hers, tosses the both of them halfway across the parking lot and into a trash can. He's back to the serious face when he turns back to Darcy, and she's not very surprised when he says, "You're sure about this whole undisclosed location thing?"

"Yep." Darcy nods. "I am. For real." She pauses for a second, searching for the right words even though he's never been one of the ones who've looked right over her. "Everything back at the lab was mine, too. I worked my ass off to get grants and finalize publishing and sat in the desert in the middle of the night, and I'm not letting _for-real_ jack-booted thugs mess it up." He smiles at that, and she grins back at him. "It's my actual decision, to Jane's actual decision, though, wow, _that_ was fast."

"Pepper Potts is a dangerously persuasive woman," Clint tells her, with a smile that says he knows this from first-hand experience. "And, since HYDRA was targeting her in particular, she's apparently on a mission to screw them over as much as possible. Getting Jane on her payroll is a big win."

"Still," Darcy muses, "it hasn't even been 48 hours."

"She's probably had a team working on a proposal for years, maybe. Since the incident in London, for sure."

"Oh, 'incident,'" Darcy laughs. "Is that what we're calling it?"

"It's better in casual conversation than 'that time in London when the world almost ended,'" Clint says dryly. "Less likely to touch off a media frenzy."

"I'm all for that," Darcy agrees. The UK press had been remarkably persistent in following Erik after his naked Stonehenge appearance; if she doesn't ever have to dodge photographers and reporters again, she'll be peachy. She watches what looks like Snoopy's Sopwith Camel taxi out onto the runway and considers her next words. Clint leans back against the car, his arms braced next to where she's sitting, no sign of impatience or edginess at having to wait around with her while his world is turned upside down, and that, more than anything, makes Darcy's decision for her. "And okay, coming back around after that little side trip to Stark Industries best practices, also in the actual decision category is me, um, wanting to know what this is between us."

He's quiet for a long time. Darcy appreciates him not just popping off a random answer, but she's also fairly sure that he's talking himself out of a lot of things. She's not really surprised when he says, "I don't know that it can really be anything. You're--"

"Yeah," Darcy interrupts before he can really get going in denial mode. "I'm about to get on a plane and go somewhere that neither of us knows, and you're about to get back in this tank-masquerading-as-a-yuppie-mobile, but my plane apparently contains a semi-mortal demigod, and you're running around saving people from actualfax Nazis while your partner is helping a surprisingly not-dead Captain America crash flying aircraft carriers. I'm not sure where a long-distance relationship fits on that scale, but it's definitely got the potential for more fun than the rest of it."

"Well, when you put it that way," Clint deadpans, bumping his shoulder into her hip. Darcy bumps back, but then settles down because he's pretty clearly not done working through everything yet. "You sure you want to tied down to somebody who's never going to be able to tell you when he's going to be with you or for how long or in what shape he's going to turn up in?"

"I don't know," Darcy says. Honesty is definitely going to be the best policy here. "I mean, I had a nice, normal guy for a while. He was sweet and smart and fun to be around. And then he stayed in England and I left, and nothing really came of it." She shrugs; she wasn't all that disappointed that keeping in touch with Ian hadn't gone very far. Nothing bad, just nothing crazy-good either. "But you keep showing up in my life and half the time I have to remind myself that I haven't actually talked to you in a year, because it never feels awkward or weird. So, if that's the question you're really asking, then I'm willing to try and see where we could go." 

"What other question would I be asking?"

"Well," Darcy says, "it's less you're asking a different question and more like I really shoved my foot in my mouth and you're trying to let me down easy." 

"Darlin', I am not smooth enough to find the ways to let people down easy." He slants a smile at her, but there's a lot more under the surface that he's not saying. "I'm more like a wrecking ball at relationships."

"I have a taser and I'm not afraid to use it," Darcy counters, which at least gets the smile into an all-out grin. She waits until they're both a little more serious before she adds, "I know this isn't the best time to bring all this up--"

"Seeing as how our past includes killer robots and brainwashing, I'd say we're doing pretty okay here," Clint says. "It's pretty sad when secret Nazi cults are the high point, but you gotta work with what you have."

"Point," Darcy answers. "Is that a yes?"

"No," Clint says, turning so he's facing her. "This is the yes," he says, his hands cupping Darcy's face and holding it steady. 

"Don't be a jerk," Darcy says, half-laughing. He smiles back at her right before his mouth finds hers, so that it's hard to tell where the kiss begins and the smile ends. 

It's not a bad way to start something, even if they only manage to get three or four kisses before Clint's phone rings with the news that the corporate jet landing behind them is the one Darcy needs to be on. 

"Have fun with the geeks," Clint says, handing her bag to her at the foot of the steps up to the plane. Darcy can see Jane just inside the door, and Thor behind her. "Don't go to Asgard without me."

" _Try_ not to jump off of things without a zipline," Darcy answers. "A parachute would be better but I'm not totally crazy."

"I don't know," Clint says, "you're starting something with me. That's generally not a sign of good sense."

"That's just because it hasn't been before," Darcy calls back over her shoulder. "It's me on the other side of the equation now and that's different."

"Whatever you say, darlin'," Clint answers. "Whatever you say."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, sorry, that took *way* longer than I thought it would, but even only writing 100 words a day gets you to the end point after a while. Thanks for hanging in there with me!


	4. On The Road

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Right, so clearly, _Age of Ultron_ totally jossed (hah, literally) this entire story (hmph), but hey, I've been skipping around using bits and pieces of canon all my fic-writing life. So, here we go with flying Sokovian cities and we'll just leave other bits of canon to other stories...

The new lab set-up isn't in Hawaii.

_Quelle surprise_.

Jane has some tl;dr, sciencey explanation about why the Mauna Kea dishes aren't quite right for the next step in her research, one that Darcy hears as _something something rain something something diffractions_ , but which boils down to them living and working in the high desert of Chile.

It's actually not _that_ big of a disappointment, partly because Darcy hadn't really expected Hawaii, but also because she's taking ridiculous satisfaction in the stamps her passport is collecting. While the time in London gave her the solid, if unexciting UK entry stamp to sit alongside the Norwegian stamp, Chile adds a certain world-traveler _je ne sais quoi_ that Darcy really hadn't ever expected to possess, not even during her most optimistic day-dreaming in high school. 

Back in the real world, though, while the views are pretty spectacular and other-worldly, the lab facility itself is some ridiculous number of feet above sea level, with air so dry that it's not a day until you get your nosebleed, and temperatures that bounce between oven-hot and freezer-cold depending on where the sun is. Also, there is wind and sand and Darcy's hair might never recover. She's always considered her complexion and its (not so) delightful tendency toward oiliness as a cross she had to bear, but here she's actually grateful for it, because it's giving her a head start in the fight to keep her skin from cracking off her face from the lack of moisture.

Jane is raking in the data, though, which is why they're there, so that's a good thing. Also of the good things are the semi-swank on-site accommodations for the technical teams, said accommodations including an actual pool and a climate-controlled botanical garden. Plus, there's the small house Stark Industries has for them to stay in when they're not up at the operational facility. It's not much bigger than the trailers they lived in pre-Bifrost discovery, but it's a solid house not far from the main square in town, which makes it easy to get around and live a semi-normal life in between the all-out sprints when Jane has access to the radio telescopes. Darcy's Spanish is pretty much fluent now, even though English is the common language up at the lab, and she's gotten pretty decent at cooking and stuff. She's even managed a couple of trips to Santiago, complete with clubbing and restaurants and actual sightseeing. She isn't quite to the point where she's dreaming in Spanish, but it takes less and less time for her brain to click over when she's out and about in town.

Access to the lab facility is pretty limited, so they take buses up and back with the rest of the technical teams who swap in and out. Almost nobody can get to the actual dishes, but of course, Stark Industries wrangled it so Jane went up once, just, she says, so she could validate the equipment, but Darcy knows it's because she is an enormous nerd and couldn't bear not seeing the radio telescopes in person even if they're at an even more ridiculous height, so much that she came back with a headache and had to sleep for a day. 

It's always interesting, coming back down from the labs. There's zero cell reception up there and the first time Darcy mentioned satellite phones, people got this horrified look about them, something to do with interference of the signal processing. (She thinks they're all just paranoid after the whole bit in Australia with a microwave oven being behind the mystery signals that had stumped the uber-geeks for decades, but she's willing to concede that discretion is the better part of valor, etc.) Most of the time, nothing's happened in the world, but every now and then, they come down to find Thor hanging out and waiting for them. Once Clint had even been there and they'd almost had a proper double-date, making it through dinner at the plaza before he'd had to swoop back out for another leg of the HYDRA hunting tour. (Darcy doesn't let herself think about the three minutes of making out against the back wall of the house that they'd managed, how easily he'd picked her up and braced her against the rough brick, how solid he felt as she'd gotten her legs around his waist, because that way lies only frustration and madness. 

Well. 

She doesn't let herself think about it _very often_. It's made for a spectacular couple of Skype sessions though. Technology FTW.)

On most days, when they're halfway back down from the labs and cell service is at least theoretically possible, Darcy turns her phone on to find a dozen or so text messages. Today, though, there are closer to thirty, and most recent of them reads, _b4 you look at the news/freak-- >we're ok/cb_. 

"Oh," Jane says when Darcy shows it to her. She fumbles for her own phone while Darcy goes straight for the good old BBCi feed (in English, because she's not sure she wants to have to translate whatever the craziness might be from Spanish no matter how good it might be for her theoretical quest to become totally fluent in Spanish.) She is vindicated in her decision by the news reports of a Eastern European city blown out of the sky by a (oh, look, they got a new one) flying aircraft carrier. 

She never would have believed _that_ if she'd been trying to read in Spanish. 

Even in English it's a little weird, and that's before Darcy gets to the reports of the flying robot army, so she takes a break and goes back through her texts, starting from the oldest so she has some hope of chronological understanding. 

" _Such_ a week we missed," Darcy mutters to Jane, who is apparently semi-buried under voice messages from Thor. (The All-Speak doesn't do texting, which Darcy feels is a serious flaw, but so far, none of the magic-wielding-types in Asgard have taken her concerns seriously.) According to Clint (who is not known for actual truth in disclosure when he thinks people might get worried), there was a 'little' raid that ended up with a 'minor' trip to medical for him. (Air quotes are sometimes the only way Darcy gets through shit like that without rolling her eyes out of her head.) Natasha has a slightly different take on events (it was seriously the best thing Darcy ever did to get on that woman's good side), but Darcy does have texts from her confirming that Clint's okay, or at least that he was before the real shitstorm hit. 

Darcy flies through most of the BBC coverage, just trying to get the gist of the insanity--she'll go through it all again once she's back at the house and can work with more than a StarkPhone on a bus shaking over packed-gravel switchbacks--and keeps coming back to that final text, the one that's time-stamped the day after the flying-city reports. She holds onto the _we're ok_ with a vengeance, because all the actual media reports sound really, really bad, and she's saying that with a personal history that includes flame-throwing robots from outer space. 

She gets herself together enough to answer the last text with a mild _alwys good 2 hear_ , and then follows it up with a kissy emoji. It's a little flip and way more shallow than all the stuff that's crashing through her, but it's better than trying to call and possibly ending up screeching at him in front of the whole busload of scientists and technicians.

Jane is working a really tight-lipped look, which means she's probably getting the same craziness from Thor's perspective. Darcy isn't in the mood to navigate Jane's emotions on top of her own, so she keeps quiet and tries to sort out where else might have decent news coverage, low on the sensationalism. (She loves Thor, she really does, but he's a _demi-god_ where Clint's just a normal guy, and her insides sometimes get all twisted up when she has to think about that.) Luckily, they're back in town and they can get off at the central square and drag their bags the three blocks to the house. It's just enough physical effort to burn off some of the nervous energy, but not so much that it wipes them out, which is super-good, because as soon as Darcy gets her laptop open and connected to wi-fi, her Skype rings with a call from AmzngHwkeye69 (yes, he thinks he's hilarious.).

It's a video call, even, which at least means she can form her own opinion of any injuries (but he knows that, so she's guessing there's not much for her _to_ see, that if there's bad stuff, it's not going to be on the surface. She hasn't hung around Jane's analytical brain for years without at least a little of it rubbing off on her, thanks very much.) Jane actually notices and disappears into her bedroom to give Darcy a little privacy (the walls aren't all that thick, but Darcy appreciates the effort nonetheless.)

"Okay," Darcy says, as soon as the call connects, "on a scale of no-big to holy-shit, how freaky has this week been?" 

"I hate to say this, but it's been so far beyond holy shit I don't think I have a scale," Clint answers, which, Darcy has to say, is a little unnerving, even with the customary smart ass attitude.

"It looked really bad even before I started reading between the lines," Darcy admits. 

"Yeah," Clint sighs. "It was… something." He's quiet for a second or two. "It was really something."

"And we missed it all," Darcy says. Now that she's thinking about it, there had been some extra gossipy swirl going on up at the labs, so at least someone had been aware. She hadn't been all that into dealing with extra scientists and their weirdnesses, though; Jane has been enough for the recent past. She makes a mental note to not let that happen again, because end-of-the-world scenarios are things she should probably be aware of, even if the thought of it is super-exhausting.

"Eh," Clint answers. "As crazy as it played out, it pretty much boiled down to the usual. You see one potential world-ender, you've seen them all."

"Sad, but true," Darcy agrees, thinking about London and New Mexico. "It's getting kind of old, you know?"

"I do know," Clint says, and for the first time, Darcy hears a certain weariness in voice. She sure as hell doesn't blame him, but she wishes she wasn't in a different hemisphere trying to connect with him over a screen that keeps pixelating on her. Before she can figure out how to say that without sounding like she's needy or like she thinks he's not living up to his super-hero rep, he shifts gears and asks her how being up at the labs is going. It's a pretty blatant change of subject, but Darcy lets him get away with it because (she tells herself) Skype is a shitty substitute for being in the same room. 

It's maybe not such a bad idea--they might not be talking about the heavy stuff, but they _are_ talking. Darcy feels a lot better by the time they disconnect, and she's pretty sure Clint looks more easy at the end, too. She's still sitting and staring at the blank Skype window when Jane comes back out of her bedroom. 

"Things just keep getting weirder," Darcy says. Jane agrees with a wordless noise. Now that she knows Clint's more-or-less okay, Darcy feels centered enough to ask about Thor. 

"He's worried about Asgard," Jane says, shrugging. "Eric wants to talk to me about it, too." That really doesn't sound good to Darcy. From Jane's expression, she's not super-happy about it either. "Look," she says abruptly. "I think I'm done here. The data is very odd, but it's been consistent over the last month. The models are just not capable of the level of differentiation that's going to be necessary."

"Okay," Darcy says, because apparently tonight is the night for not really talking about the hard, emotional stuff, and hey, she can change topics with the best of them. "So, fancier models?"

"And a supercomputer," Jane says. This is not a huge surprise. Jane's models can bring even the best mainframes to their metaphorical knees and if she thinks they're not complex enough now, Darcy doesn't want think about how much computing power they'll take once she's gets done tweaking them.

"Well, good that we're working for Stark Industries," Darcy says. She's written more than one application to get a time allotment on assorted supercomputers and they're all run by self-important assholes, most of whom, funnily enough, have always seemed to have reasons why requests from Dr. Jane Foster won't fit into their schedule, while having far fewer issues with the same proposals from Dr. J. A. Foster. Darcy is going to assume that SI isn't going to jerk Jane around, not when they jumped so fast to hire her (and because she knows Jane has a direct line to Pepper Potts and Darcy is not afraid to use it.)

"It should be better," Jane agrees. She drums her fingers and fidgets with her hair, and Darcy knows she's already checking out here, impatient to be getting on with the next thing. "The thing is, I don't know how long it might take." She half-shrugs. "I have some ideas that are… different."

"Different, how?" Darcy asks, but really, she doesn't understand the theoretical basis of Jane's work now, so if she's getting even more complex and 'different', there's not much chance of Darcy understanding even the very basic part, no matter how much Jane wants her to. Jane knows that, too. Darcy can tell just by looking at her, and maybe it's finally time to think a little more closely about what Jane needs in an assistant. 

They sit and look at each other, and it's not like either one of them expected a six-month-long internship to turn into years of craziness and some pretty freaking amazing discoveries, but it did and here they are, sitting in an apartment in the mountains of Chile looking at yet another unexpected crossroad.

"You know, I'm guessing SI takes pretty good care of their geeks," Darcy says, at the same time Jane tells her, "You should go back and finish your degree."

"I--" Darcy starts, while Jane is saying, "You--" and they end up staring at each other more, until Darcy shrugs and smiles and Jane smiles back.

"I'm not trying to get rid of you," Jane starts, and Darcy finishes up, "But it might not be a bad time for me to go do my own thing for a while."

"This," Jane waves her hand around, encompassing the computers and the electronics piled in the corner," was supposed to help with your degree, not drag you off."

"Well, who knew you were going to be mostly right about everything?" Darcy chews on her lower lip and thinks about what Jane said. She hasn't really been thinking about going back to school, but apparently her subconscious has, because there's an entire process already mapped out as soon as she lets the idea in, schedules and credit hours and—most importantly—her bank balance. "I could probably finish by the end of the year," she muses. "Especially if they let me take classes over the summer sessions."

"You should do that," Jane says firmly. "Your education is important."

"Thanks, Professor Grandma," Darcy deadpans, but she's a little touched that Jane's stepped out of her head enough to be all bossy at Darcy about something other than her work. "No going to Hawaii while I'm gone, though."

"The array at Mauna Kea isn't right for the--" Jane starts, in her _I'm sure I've explained this to you before_ voice, but then she catches on and stops, glaring at Darcy. 

"Yeah, yeah, you keep saying that," Darcy says airily. "But how do you _know_ until you've got actual data? Isn't that how the scientific method works? Hypothesis, test, conclusion, right?"

"Well, I guess you did pay attention at some point." Jane rolls her eyes at Darcy's self-satisfied smirk.. 

"Oh, I totally got my six credits worth of science education," Darcy says. "Just don't file the application for time on the Hawaii dishes that I've written up until I'm done with Culver. Deal?"

"Deal," Jane answers, and Darcy smiles in satisfaction.

x - x - x

Darcy works the coming-back-after-a-leave-of-absence mojo like… well, like she's filing grant applications for Jane (which always have included the not-so-altruistic side-effect of making sure she, personally, gets to eat.) She's a little weirded out at the thought of being a student again--so much has happened since she left, she feels like a completely different person--but she does recognize that finishing her degree is something she should do, and if she's going to do it, she's going to do it full-tilt.

Culver isn't big on their students taking leaves-- _It doesn't demonstrate maturity or responsibility_ , her adviser had said when she broached the topic with him way back when it'd become apparent that whatever Jane was doing, it wasn't going to stop soon and Darcy wanted to be along for it. Darcy is lucky it got said over email, because if he'd said that to her face, she wouldn't have been able to keep from telling him where to shove his entitled, privileged ass. And that would have been Bad, at least for her chances at finishing things up at a later date. He's no longer her adviser (she doesn't qualify for his standards, she guesses), so at least she's not relying on him for recommendations. He could still torpedo her, though, so she's going to have to make sure her application for reinstatement is as badass as she can make it. 

It helps that she's able to say truthfully that she took the leave because of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. And then Jane writes a very convincing reference in which she never once mentions any of their squabbles and drops in comments like _eagerness to learn_ and _invaluable resource in analysis and synthesis stages of my work._ By the time Darcy is done working every trick she's picked up in the grant-writing process, her application looks as impressive as hell, even with not being able to talk about half of what happened in London. It doesn't hurt that Jane's name is semi-splashed over the science journals as the first recipient of the Howard and Maria Stark Fellowship for Science and Engineering. (Darcy is pretty sure her eyes were in danger of bugging out of her head when she sees the honorarium attached to said fellowship, but SI has been paying them both very well for the year they've been employed, so she probably shouldn't have been surprised.) 

And Darcy does mean 'them' when she's talking about paychecks, because she herself has been the recipient of regular direct deposits with more places to the left of the decimal than have ever been sent to her outright. It's very refreshing to actually have financial options. She doesn't go crazy or anything, but when Erik sends her the name of a friend who has an apartment to rent, Darcy takes his word that it's worth it and doesn't bother trying to find someone to split the rent with. 

By the time she and Jane pack up the equipment and data and get it all and themselves onto a flight bound for New York and Stark Tower, Darcy has almost everything worked out. In fact, since she gets the email with her reinstatement acceptance as she's getting on the plane and can connect with the on-flight wifi to register for summer classes (she is seriously going to miss the Stark Industries expense reporting and reimbursement accounts), she is so far out in front of her planning, she almost doesn't recognize herself. Of course, she hasn't really thought about how much her life is about to change, so maybe she really is going along like normal. 

Darcy leans her head back against the (very nice, business-class, one last hurrah for her Stark expense account) seat and tells her subconscious that she's perfectly fine walking away from this life that she's carved out, that change is good and going back to school makes perfect sense, etc, etc, etc, but isn't surprised to be dreaming crazy dreams when she finally gives in to how tired she is. She wakes up with a vague unease, but that mostly gets swamped under the getting-all-her-crap-off-the-plane details, and the all-purpose nerves that going through Immigration always gives her. (Listen to her, like her first overseas trip hadn't been only a couple of years before. Working with Jane really has created crazy amounts of change in her life.)

There's a driver from Stark Industries waiting for them as they clear Customs at JFK (and it's kind of a kick that it's Darcy's name on the sign he's holding up, just to keep another layer of obfuscation around Jane's work) and Jane is tired enough from the flight (which wasn't what you would call smooth) that she lets him help with all the trunks and boxes that hold her specialized equipment. That still means Darcy is helping her schlep the bags carrying the hard drives with the actual data, plus all of her handwritten notes, but it's better than nothing. 

Stark Tower is as OTT as Darcy's reality-TV-loving-heart could have wished for--moreso, even. Even the lab floors have nicer amenities than Darcy's family's house--Darcy can tell right away that Jane's probably never going to leave them. Half of Darcy is torn between relief that Jane will have access to actual nutrition and hydration (the refrigerators are stocked and monitored daily; Darcy has the request form with Jane's likes and dislikes already filled out) and semi-aggravated that all of her conditioning over the last few years (Jane has actually started to pay attention to the time and at least remembers if she has or hasn't eaten during the day) is all for naught. 

The original plan had been for Darcy to stay for a couple of days to help Jane unpack the lab, and then go fly down to Virginia and dive into the last of the summer sessions at Culver. Between that, a judiciously over-loaded fall semester and the mother of all independent studies (which Darcy has been designing for years), she'll be done with a BS by December. 

Jane doesn't really need any help, though. SI runs like clockwork and their facilities team has all of the equipment they had had shipped from storage up and running before dinner (at a reasonable hour, no less.) Jane _says_ she'll come have a farewell dinner even as she's wandering around the lab, touching all the electronics like a mother hen counting her sheep. Darcy isn't all that hungry, and she knows that Jane will be a lot better company if she satisfies herself that she'll be able to dive right into work as soon as they finish eating, so she leaves Jane cooing over her stuff and settles on one of the (stupidly comfortable) chairs in the break room. She means to come up with some kind of a plan of attack for when she gets to Culver so she won't waste time running around trying to get settled, but it's peaceful and comfortable, and she's tired enough that the next thing she knows, she's blinking back awake with Thor rushing up to her, all smiles and affection. 

"I am glad we have not missed you," he says, his voice that muted roar he does when he's happy but aware that he's indoors and trying not to shake the house down around him. "Jane tells me you are to return to your studies immediately." 

"I--" Darcy totally means to answer him--it _is_ the polite thing to do after all--but there's that 'we' that he's said, and -- _yes_ , Clint's right there behind him. Darcy's brain short-circuits to her scrambling off the chair and throwing herself in his direction before her mouth can finish off her reply. Apparently, she hadn't actually been processing the whole Sokovian incident as well as she thought she had because she is pretty much powerless to keep her cool and just wants to get her hands on him. Fortunately, Clint has reflexes that hold up to Darcy's hamster-on-crack id and catches her easily. "Hi," she says breathlessly. "You didn't tell me you were here."

"Hi, I'm here," he answers with a predictable smirk. "We came down from upstate just now."

"Oh," Darcy says, not letting go of Clint but twisting back around to where Thor is patiently waiting. "Sorry, big guy." He smiles at her, clearly not offended. Darcy smiles back. "I got distracted. How are you?"

"I am... well," Thor answers. Darcy narrows her eyes at that little hesitation. She's pretty sure it means there's shenanigans happening in Asgard, but before she can press, Thor is backing off, saying, "I will go to fetch my Jane--we must both celebrate your arrivals and not let you leave without wishing you well for your future studies."

He tramps away cheerfully enough, shouting for Jane, and, chewing thoughtfully on her bottom lip, Darcy turns back to Clint. "I can't decide if I'm scared to know what he thinks is a proper celebration or really freaking excited."

Clint snorts. "You're excited, don't give me that crap."

"You're right," Darcy decides. "So long as we have bail money." Clint laughs and she leans her forehead against his. "Hi," she says again. "I'm really glad you're here."

"I am really glad to be here," Clint answers. "Really." The last part is a little muffled due to Darcy needing not just to get her hands on him, but also get the kissing started. He doesn't seem to mind, though. 

Darcy can't decide if it's just that she's loopy due having been traveling for the better part of two days, or if things are shifting and moving on her, but it feels a lot more serious to be kissing him this time. They're in the middle of a lab floor at Stark Tower, with Thor and Jane due back at any second--to say nothing of the rest of the staff that Darcy knows are around--but she really, seriously can't think of anything but the guy who's holding her against him.

It's probably good that Thor comes back to make good on his promise of celebrating when he does, because if he'd left it any longer, Darcy wouldn't have cared that he'd pulled off the miracle of getting Jane out of the shiny new lab space, she really wouldn't have let Clint go. 

Clint seems okay with it, too, though she thinks it's mostly that he knows Thor well enough to know how much effort it takes to go against the flow, at least until he figures out that wherever Thor is hell-bent on them going is one of, (as Clint puts it with a groan), "Stark's trendy hell-holes."

"No," Thor says, looking at Jane with an expression that Darcy can only call besotted. Who knew anyone out of romance novels ever looked like that? "I told him most firmly that my Jane would not enjoy such a place." 

Clint looks a little skeptical, but finally nods. "Yeah, you and me, he'd pick out the worst place he could think of--and call the papps, too, but for the doc, he's not gonna want to piss her off on the first day." 

Thor tears his eyes away from Jane and smiles at Darcy. "I am sorry, Darcy, for I am certain you might find a place such as that to be entertaining, but I am more of a mind to hear and see you before you go."

It's not that he's wrong--Darcy _would_ be pretty damn entertained by anyplace that would cater to Tony Stark--but she's also seriously jet-lagged and worn out from the flights, and it'd be a shame to blow a fine opportunity like that on her mood tonight. She has a reputation to maintain, though, so she tilts her head consideringly and says, "Okay, we'll play Old Home Week tonight, but once I'm finished with school and it's New Year's Eve, you owe me a--" She hesitates for a split second, because she'd like to actually have a date for the big night and she can't quite see Clint in a dance club-- "A speakeasy that's so private the hipsters think of it like Brigadoon."

Thor blinks at her and she wonders how exactly the All-Speak translated all that, but he nods and holds out his hand to give her the forearm clasp that seals the deal, and they're off to find out what kind of a restaurant Tony Stark thinks a genius astrophysicist might be comfortable in.

x - x - x

The answer to that turns out to be a glorified steak house with slabs of meat the size of said genius astrophysicist's head. Darcy is seriously not the type of person who flinches in the face of too much food, but even she's a tiny bit overwhelmed by the thought of a 40-ounce bone-in ribeye. Fortunately, the atmosphere is quiet and sedate, and Jane is perfectly happy to nibble off Thor's plate. Thor, needless to say, is thrilled to share.

"They're kind of adorable," Darcy murmurs to Clint as Jane lets Thor pick out the best pieces for her while she chatters on about the new lab and how it's going to fit with her new theories. (Darcy has no idea how Thor is making that 'best' decision, but she figures she's better off not even asking.)

"He hardly ever shuts up about her," Clint answers. Darcy half-expects an eye roll to go with the comment, but Clint seems pretty easy about the whole thing. Contemplating her 'petite' sirloin and trying to decide if she's going to be able to stuff herself for two or three meals, Darcy realizes she could have gone for the cute, food-sharing thing, too. She's clearly off her game if Jane is performing couple rituals better than she is.

She's not the only one, though, because once the food gets sorted out, it's pretty apparent that Clint and Thor are determinedly not thinking about the A(vengers) word and are ducking all mentions of the team. And Jane, _Jane_ , of all people, steps up and fills the silence with a detailed analysis of Darcy and her re-enrollment plans, and specifically on how annoying the trip to Culver is without a car. She has Clint and Thor practically clucking with concern.

"It'll be _fine_ ," Darcy says through gritted teeth because there's nothing like sounding like a helpless idiot to give her virtual lockjaw. Her plan is to fly into Charlottesville and then take Greyhound from there. She's done it before: the flight's okay if you don't mind the puddle-jumper style of plane, but the bus stops in every tiny town between Charlottesville and the border, so it takes pretty much all day. "I'm not blowing half my savings on a car--" She holds up one hand as Thor tries to tell her again that he can speak to Tony about it. "Technically, I don't work for him--and even if he'd do me a favor, I'd rather save that for when I need a job in a couple of months. So. Really. Fine."

She can manage at school without a car and she doesn't have the faintest idea what's going to happen after she graduates--she can make the auto-owning decision once she figures all that out. Fly/bus is a perfectly viable plan, and not even for Jane's distraction is she spending money she doesn't have.

"It's ridiculous that the Culver administration keeps buying into the isolationist part of the school's charter," Jane snips. "If they don't see being out in the mountains all alone as any kind of a problem, why should any corporation bother with transportation. I'm not talking non-stop international flights, but even Charlottesville has someplace for commuter flights to land." 

"Jane--" Darcy starts, because this is really not the time for the Culver-UVa BS, but Jane is on a roll.

"It's long past time for them to give all that up--it's bad enough, having to compete against the whole 'Mr. Jefferson's school' hype, the faculty doesn't need internal handicaps on top of that."

It falls to Darcy to explain Thomas Jefferson (with a side trip into early American presidents and their lack of comprehension about actual inalienable rights) and how he founded the University of Virginia _and_ the academic rivalry Culver has with it, but once Thor gets the gist, he's all over 'warring scholars.' Apparently, the geeks fight it out on Asgard, too. Who knew?

It's not how Darcy had planned to spend her last/only night in New York, but there _is_ good food and some super tasty cocktails, so that's a plus. Also, she's got her own personal Avenger and there really isn't anything wrong about that.

"Listen," Clint says once they're back at the Tower and Thor has let Jane steer him off to see the rest of her lab (bless him, but he's actually sincerely interested in it--truer love, etc, etc, Darcy thinks.) "About your getting to Culver--" 

"It's really not that big of a deal," Darcy says. Helpless and incompetent is not really the angle she's trying to work with him. "Jane's just all wound up about stuff."

"I can drive you down if you want," Clint offers. "It won't take all that long--we can do it in a day, easy. And it'd be a lot cheaper than you getting a commercial flight and then the bus." 

Of all the things for which she's been rehearsing replies in her head, this was not only not on the list, Darcy hadn't even realized it was a possibility for the list. It takes her a second to catch up to reality. "You don't have to do that," she finally answers. "I really will be fine."

"Yeah, no, I know," Clint says. "I just… We almost always end up together because of some weird, world-ending scenario, and this seemed, I dunno… Normal." He rubs at the back of his neck, clearly a little self-conscious. "You know, like what somebody would do for their girlfriend."

Well, when he puts it that way, how's Darcy supposed to say no?

"Okay," she tells him. "If you're sure you want to drive all day, I'll be happy to let you. But I'm paying for gas and food and everything else."

"Sure," Clint agrees with a suspicious ease, and Darcy firmly resolves that she's not letting him get away with paying for anything. 

Jane smiles in a superior sort of way when Darcy tells her the news, and a nasty suspicion pops into Darcy's brain. "Oh my god, did you do that on _purpose?_ " she demands, groaning when Jane gives her a shifty-eyed look in answer. "Shit, you did."

"You two need to spend more time together," Jane says, turning back to one of her monitors.

"Yes," Darcy snaps. "We do, but holy shit, Jane--I don't need any help in looking like a kid who has to be babysat around him."

Jane ignores her, which means that either Darcy is talking about things she has no hope of understanding and Jane doesn't want to try to explain, or that she knows Darcy's right and she doesn't want to admit it. Since this isn't about physics, Darcy is going with Door Number Two. She stomps over to one of the mainframe terminals and starts randomly changing the default colors and fonts, going for obnoxious combinations just to remind Jane that multiple doctorates don't mean shit when it comes to interpersonal stuff. 

"Hawkeye speaks nothing about you that is not good," Thor finally says, evidently tired of the freeze-off they're working. "It is not out of pity that he wishes to assist you."

"I guess," Darcy sighs. "Probably. It's just…" She resists the urge to put her head down on the desk. "Some co-ed trying to get back to school to finish her BA really doesn't stack up well against the ex-wife who's a SHIELD agent _with_ her doctorate, you know?"

Jane mutters something under her breath, which is aggravating enough that Darcy is pretty proud that she only snaps, "Words, Jane. I know you know them."

"Student," Jane snaps back. "You're a _student_. 'Co-ed' is a pathetic remnant of a sexist tradition and you don't need to perpetuate it, especially not against yourself." 

"Really not the point here," Darcy grits out. Jane glares at her and Darcy sighs. "Fine. I will not support the patriarchy no matter how insecure I am."

"Thank you," Jane says. It gets quiet for a while (Thor is watching from the corner, not saying anything--Darcy always knew he was smarter than anyone gave him credit for), but then it's Jane's turn to sigh. "I didn't mean to make you feel stupid. I'm sorry."

Thor smiles at her, and then turns to Darcy. It's pretty pointed for all that he hasn't said a word. 

Darcy rolls her eyes, but since he's right--it _is_ Darcy's turn to be a grown-up--she offers, "It wasn't all you--I could stand to be a little less touchy." Jane half-smiles at Darcy and turns back to her 'scope and Darcy cocks an eyebrow at Thor. "Okay, Big Guy?"

"It is never wise to part on harsh words," Thor says quietly, which is a giant ball of projection and guilt if Darcy ever heard one so she just nods and goes and sits with him and his regrets while Jane frankensteins some hard drives together and generally starts to make the lab her own.

x - x - x

Morning is still Darcy's least favorite time of day even if Stark Tower does have the most amazing coffee she's ever tasted and a shower that has moves better than 90 percent of the guys she's slept with. She's still staring at it forlornly when Clint calls to say he's on the first level of the parking garage and ready whenever she is.

"It was hard to say good-bye," Darcy says, settling herself in the passenger seat of his oh-so-perfectly-in-character classic, restored GTO. "To the shower, I mean." He snorts a little and she shrugs. "Jane will be skyping me in an hour, as soon as she can't remember where she packed something. No real good-byes there. But that shower was incredible." She sighs wistfully and then remembers she has coffee for him and hands over the travel mug. "The AI said it was personalized and if I go back it'll be exactly the same." She eyes the stainless steel cup thoughtfully. "Even if it's not true, don't tell me. It's a little too weird to have a non-person person on call."

"It was okay with Jarvis," Clint says. "But I haven't gotten used to the new one."

"Jarvis?" Darcy asks. "Our Jarvis? From my sole-attempt-to-be-a-badass rescue mission?" When Clint nods, she shakes her head. "No fucking way," Darcy says. "He was better people than 99 percent of the actual people I know." She cocks her head as a bad things occur to her. "Do I want to know why there's another one now?"

"Uh," Clint says, and then shrugs. "This is all hush-hush, but hell, you've been in this mess almost from the start, so, yeah, just don't go posting this on facebook or twitter—"

"Please," Darcy interrupts. "My _family_ is on Facebook. Nothing goes there anymore. Instagram." She waves a hand. "Periscope if it's got video quality."

"Let's just say to keep it off your internet hangout, okay?" Clint rolls his eyes at her. Darcy would really like to know how he does that and keep driving at an excessive speed in bumper-to-bumper traffic, but it's probably even more classified. "Yeah, so, he's, uh, an actual person now."

Darcy blinks. "That was not at all what I was braced for." She chews thoughtfully on her bottom lip. "And now that I know, I kinda have to ask how that even works." Her brain unhelpfully supplies a horrible, iconic image. "Please don't tell me there are giant bolts and creepy stitch-work and lightning involved."

"Well, no--"

"Or, fuck, Stark had somebody rob a grave, didn't he?"

"No grave-robbing," Clint assures her. "No stitches either. It's all super-hi-tech stuff, skin and all that." He reaches over and takes her hand, sliding it up under his t-shirt, his skin warm against her palm. "Right… here," he says. He stops their hands right below his ribs and Darcy suddenly realizes what he's showing her. "You're not supposed to be able to feel a difference—"

"Wait," Darcy interrupts. "This--- _This_ is the 'oh-it-was-nothing-they-just-made-me-go-to-Medical-because-they're-lame,' pre-flying city/killer robot army incident? You needed fake _skin_ after that? You needed something like that and you couldn't bother to--"

Darcy knows she doesn't have much of a brain-to-mouth filter in the best of times, but now, hearing-- _understanding_ \--what he's really saying, the words are flying out of her mouth so fast she honestly doesn't know what's coming next. She's willing to bet it's not going to be helpful, though. She manages to shut up without literally covering her mouth, which at least means she doesn't look like any more of a freak than she is, and the final, bitten-off word hangs in the air between them.

"Darc--" Clint starts.

"Don't," she says, her throat so tight she's amazed the word even gets out. Her brain is skittering all over the place, one thought tumbling into the next and the next and then she's back where she started and ready for another round. 

Or not. 

She figures it's basically even odds whether she's going to burst into tears or start screaming.

She can't read anything in the profile Clint's presenting her with, his eyes on the road in front of them, and she's abruptly aware that she still has her hand pressed to his side.

"Shit," Darcy sighs, making herself let go of him and sitting on her hands to keep from grabbing at him again. "I just—I don't know, my brain is doing its best impression of a hamster on crack and I don't--" She shrugs helplessly. "I don't know whether I'm more scared that you go out there no matter what bad shit might be going down, or more pissed--" She really means 'hurt,' but there's enough anger under it all for what she's saying not to be a total lie-- "that I'm not important enough to be in the loop when the bad shit actually does happen."

That gets his attention, even if it's only a quick flick of his eyes. She knows him well enough to know that's roughly equivalent to a normal person slewing around and staring at her, especially when he ninjas the car over to the shoulder in no time flat.

"What is this to you? You and me." Clint's eyes are still on the road in front of them, but Darcy isn't dumb enough to think he's not focused on her. "Because I can go all in, or we can keep it easy, but I can't make that call myself, and I can't--" He sighs and finally turns to look at her. "It'd be better if we didn't cross our signals on this."

"All in," Darcy says immediately, her mouth way out in front of her brain. That's not really anything new, but she's also come to appreciate that it generally does know what she wants. It's not helpful now, though, because Clint doesn't know that--or, no, it's more that he's not really trusting it. 

"This--" he says, gesturing to his side, "I'm not seeing where the Avenger stuff is getting less crazy, or less likely to happen. Are you sure you really want to sign up for that? It's okay if you're not--I get that it's more than most people have to deal with."

Darcy makes herself wait this time, so he knows that she's not just blowing him off. "I'm not going to be any less scared if we're not actually together," she finally says. She shrugs a little, more self-conscious than she expects to be. "I can't just flip a switch and turn everything off. I'm still going to care even if you just drop me off and head off into the sunset." She will pitch a fit before she lets that happen, but now is probably not the time to bring that up. "If we're really real, I--I don't know, get to have the good stuff, too."

Darcy thinks he's maybe a little bit less tense, so she guesses she said what he wanted to hear, that he really does want the real thing, too; but she's also aware he might not be thinking things through either. It's not something she wants to deal with, but the longer they go along, the worse it'll feel if he's not, and right now is probably the best opening she's ever going to get, so she sucks up her courage and says, "But I'm not… Look, I've met the women you hang out with, and I'm not the Black Widow, or Agent Dr. Morse, so I don't know if I'm what _you_ want, not for real."

She's proud that her voice stays steady (even if it could have been a little more forceful; she hasn't managed much volume above a murmur, but one thing at a time.) The car rocks a little as traffic flies past. It just figures that they're having the big, emotional Relationship-with-a-capital-R talk in a car on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike. Nothing else about them has happened in any sort of normal way, so why start now, Darcy thinks.

She makes herself keep holding Clint's eyes even though she's nervous enough about what she might see there that she thinks she might throw up. In a stunning reversal of her most deeply held beliefs that the universe is having one on at her expense, though, her (admittedly minor) bravery is rewarded by getting to see the lopsided smile he gives her when he answers, "I don't need you to be." All the air whooshes out of Darcy's lungs and his smile deepens. "Uh, given my actual history, I'm pretty sure I don't even want you to be."

"Okay," Darcy says, which is not exactly the height of intelligent discourse, but apparently she'd been a little more invested in this whole thing than she'd let herself think. "Okay, good. I'm--I mean, I know I'm kind of at a different point in life--"

"You do what you need to do," Clint tells her. "I mean that, Darcy. The rest of this… this craziness is going to happen however it's going to happen, and if that throws something stupid at us, we'll figure it out then, okay?"

"Okay," Darcy says again, more firmly this time. She takes a couple of deep, restoring breaths, and then adds, "You have to take your own advice, too, okay?"

"Yeah," Clint says, way too easily. Darcy arches a disbelieving eyebrow at him. "Yeah, I know. I'll work on it."

"And I need to know what's really going on," Darcy says. "I can't--" She waves her hand toward his side. "It's scary as shit, but my brain really does do better if it's not making up its own worst-case scenarios."

"Yeah," Clint sighs. "I'm kinda bad about that." He tips his head back against the head-rest. "Can't really say it in a text, though."

"No," Darcy admits. She thinks about how quickly she'd skipped away from all mention of the bad stuff during their calls. "We kind of suck at the whole communication thing."

"I appreciate the 'we,'" Clint says, "but--"

"Yeah, no, I mean it," Darcy insists. "I duck out of shit just as much as you do, only I do it by babbling about stupid stuff instead of pretending whatever it is isn't a big deal like you do." Clint doesn't say anything, but he doesn't look like he's going to argue, so Darcy counts it as a win. "All in?" she asks.

"All in," Clint answers, tipping his head to the side and smiling at her, and Darcy doesn't care if they are sitting next to the New Jersey Turnpike, she undoes her seat belt and climbs over the console so she can get a for-real kiss and seal the deal they just made.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for the comments and kudos and enthusiasm! It has made trying to figure all this out so much more fun than just doing it on my own. ♥
> 
> This... was not where I thought this chapter was going to end, but I clearly know nothing when it comes to this particular story (::eyes original posting date and tries not to do the math::) There is a little bit more (which I *thought* was going to be the end, but which my brain points out is more Yet Another Step), so I'll be back in a bit.


	5. Culver

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clint’s grin flashes out right as he leans in to meet Darcy’s kiss, and as much as she hasn’t really found any of his kisses to be disappointing, now that they have time and no one trying to kill them, she is definitely a fan of the long, slow ones that set the stage for everything else she knows is coming. 
> 
> “Let the weekend commence,” Darcy murmurs, tugging him off the steps and off toward his car.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Post AoU, pre CA: CW, and I stay far away from spoilers so anything I'm implying here has nothing to do with what might happen in the future of the MCU. Also, this got a little Mature-er than it's been but I didn't think it quite got up to where the whole thing warranted an Explicit rating.

Darcy knows that her advisor probably wants her to stay and schmooze for a while at the inter-departmental, Friday afternoon Let's-Pretend-We-Aren't-All-Introvert-Policy-Wonks faculty/student mixer, but _a)_ Darcy _isn't_ an introvert and she's already made two full rounds and gotten all the good gossip before the rest of the crowd has barely managed to work up the mental energy to start nodding awkward hellos to each other; and _b)_ has she mentioned the part where she isn't an introvert and therefore actually has plans for the long weekend? Parts _c)_ through _zzzz)_ all follow along the same line of reasoning, and while she might ordinarily take it as her duty and calling to make small talk (with the more painfully non-social members of her cohort, even), today is not that day. She makes her escape and practically runs off campus, slowing down only when she skids around the last corner and catches sight of the familiar figure leaning back on his elbows on the steps up to her apartment. 

She'd keep up the sprint because she's long past trying to be cool about the guy, but her landlady is already out and at the foot of the steps. Darcy really did luck out with Miss Caroline--the apartment is nice and well-kept and super-close to campus--but she's the type of older, Southern lady who can't not talk with everyone she sees. Add in the part where she's a widow and (Darcy suspects) a little lonely, and it doesn't matter if Darcy's there or not, she's going to do her Southern hospitality thing and make sure Clint knows he's welcome anytime, so there's no need for Darcy to rush.

"And how is dear Dr. Selvig?" she's asking as Darcy walks up. Clint's on his feet now (because _he's_ got this old-fashioned thing about manners that kicks in at odd times) and he slants a ghost of a knowing smirk at Darcy. They'd figured out early on that she has a genteel thing for Erik, which Darcy figures is the real reason she's got such a deal on rent. 

"He's fine, he's good," Clint answers. "Working hard, being a genius…"

"Well, I certainly hope they appreciate him there." Miss Caroline wraps her cardigan tighter around herself. She's as impeccably dressed as always (seriously, she came over and changed the furnace filter at Darcy's apartment in her silk blouse and pearls and didn't get so much as a smudge. It's not Darcy's style at all, but she has to give credit where it's due.) "Tell him we miss him here at Culver."

"Yes, ma'am," Clint says, very serious and earnest (and 100% non-ironic so far as Darcy can tell. He's pretty adorable even if she's well aware of his less-than adorable tendencies.) "I'll be sure to let him know you were asking about him."

"That's very thoughtful of you," she answers. "I'm sure you must be very busy as well." Darcy hasn't quite decided if she's figured out who Clint really is, but even if she has, she's been totally chill about it. "And here's Darcy, so I'll let you two start your weekend. I know you don't get enough time together."

Compared to the first three years of knowing each other, seeing each other a couple of times a month is crazy talk, but Darcy isn't going to argue with her. She _doesn't_ get enough time with Clint, but she's beginning to think she could be with the guy 24/7 and still feel like that. 

"Hi, Miss Caroline," Darcy says as the older woman pats her on the arm as she walks past. "Bye, Miss Caroline, have a nice evening."

"You, too, dear." 

Darcy makes a mental note to see if there's anything she needs done--she really is a nice lady and she's charging Darcy next to nothing for rent, all because Darcy worked with Erik--but later, because she absolutely does have so much better things to do with her weekend.

"Hi," she says to Clint, and if she's still a little breathless from her mad dash across campus, at least she isn't completely gasping for air. (The C25K remains a goal, but she's better than she used to be.) 

"Hey, darlin'," Clint says, smiling just enough to get the eye crinkles involved, which is dirty poker as far as Darcy's higher brain functions are concerned. At some point, she assumes her insides will stop turning to mush at the combination, but, yeah, hasn't happened so far.

"Well, aren't you just Wingman of the Year," Darcy says, because even if she _is_ stark raving gone on the guy, she can still manage at least a little snark. It's as clear of an indication as she's ever going to get that the sarcasm is encoded in her DNA, but she'll take it.

"Somebody's gotta give the guy a hand," Clint says. "I figure he's a pretty decent catch, he just needs a little something to counteract the absent-minded professor vibe." He cocks his head and considers the matter. "You know, he's smart; he's got a pretty decent gig now that he's working for Stark; he's a nice guy. We just need to distract the nice lady from the clothes and—

"And how he's got zero game, and I'm speaking as someone who has spent more than her fair share of time around geeks." Darcy drops her backpack and leans in for a kiss. "And seriously, as much as I love Erik, this is my limit on talking about his potential sex life."

Clint's grin flashes out right as he meets Darcy's kiss, and as much as she hasn't really found any of his kisses to be disappointing, now that they have time and no one trying to kill them, she is definitely a fan of the long, slow ones that set the stage for everything else she knows is coming. 

"Let the weekend commence," Darcy murmurs and tugs him off the steps and off toward his car.

x - x - x

"Okay," Darcy's saying two beers and a double-stack cheeseburger later, "I know 'Uncle Buck' isn't generally who you'd think of when it comes to entertainment, but check it out." She points out the window on her side of the car to where a billboard is proudly proclaiming that whoever Uncle Buck might be, he has the best corn maze in the state. Judging from the number of cars parked alongside the two-lane state route that doubles as a drag racing course during the middle of the night, the claim isn't just empty advertising. Of course, Darcy thinks as Clint cocks an eyebrow at her even as he's dutifully easing the car into an empty spot, 'best in the state' doesn't actually have to mean all that much.

Still.

It's a super-nice evening, too nice to be sequestering themselves inside, especially since it's October and the mountain winter can't be much more than a step or two away, waiting to roar down on them. The maze stretches out across what looks like a pretty decent piece of land, with a crow's nest platform in the center where the staff can call directions through a bull horn to the completely-lost and picnic tables and a not-too-close-to-falling-down place to buy popcorn and caramel apples and hot cider. Off to one side Darcy can see a bunch of inflatable bouncy castles and stuff, so there's a family crowd vibe to it all. Darcy grins as a couple groups of teenagers cruise by, trying to look cool while they check out who's hanging out with whom and dodging all the kids running around on the non-obnoxious side of excited. She prides herself on saving the Netflix-and-chill option for the third or fourth night of a visit--this is totally an acceptable, nostalgic alternative to a night in what passes for a club in Culver.

Plus, no matter how much of a badass he is, Clint loves this kind of stuff. It's not even that he's going along with whatever Darcy suggests just to be polite, it's that he genuinely has a good time with it all. From the little he's said about growing up, she doesn't get the impression that it included much of anything fun. He's pretty Zen about it (for definitions of the word that include compartmentalization that would make a shrink roll their eyes out of their head, but hey, it's not like the rest of the Avengers are poster children for the land of Happy And Well-Adjusted), but even the little she knows for sure--never mind everything she's figuring out from reading between the lines--is like waving a red flag in front of Darcy. She is absolutely fine being the one who gets to make Normal Life happen.

She even manages to slide her cash across the counter for their tickets before he can, and dances off when he gives her that look that says she's insulting his manhood or whatever. "It's the 21st Century, dude," she calls back over her shoulder. "You got dinner, I've got this."

Clint rolls his eyes at her but follows along. Darcy puts a little extra effort into the hip shimmies, mostly just 'cause she can. It's not like they're not both aware that they'll be getting lucky later tonight. That's pretty much a foregone conclusion--Darcy feels like they'll be making up for the no-sex part of their early relationship for years, even if they had spent that first week in Culver fucking against, on, and (in a few frantic examples of hormone-addled lack of decision-making capability) under every possible surface in her apartment and his car. By the second day, she'd started a spreadsheet to keep track of it all. (Jane will be so proud when Darcy finally gets around to sharing it with her--data is always vital to informed theories, right?)

Darcy wrenches her brain back around to her current setting and waits for Clint to catch up with her. There's a bottleneck of people around the entrance to the maze itself, just hanging out, waiting for their turn to start. Darcy takes the opportunity to lean back into Clint and get the cuddle-up portion of the evening started. He smiles down at her (the kind of smile that's mostly about his eyes, which she especially likes because she's pretty sure he doesn't do it with more than a handful of people) and lets her take his hand.

The guys running the entrance queue turn out to be pretty good at the job, spacing people out so that when they hit the first intersection, there's no one in sight to give them a hint of which way to go. Darcy chews thoughtfully on her lower lip and finally tilts her head off to the right. Clint arches an eyebrow but follows along, still not objecting to her keeping hold of his hand. Since she'd been blindly guessing, it's not all that big of a surprise to hit a dead end after a couple of corners and straightaways.

"I'd say 'whoops,'" Darcy says as she turns around and leans up to kiss him, "but I wouldn't mean it." Clint catches on quickly, sliding his hands down to her hips to hold her steady, turning what might have only been light and quick into something pretty damn spectacular. "A-plus, superhero," she says breathlessly when they finally start moving again. He smirks at her and pulls her in close for one more quick, rough kiss, and yeah, Darcy will be totally honest and admit that she has zero idea where they're going, how they got there, or even if they're just walking in circles. She doesn't really care either.

She's pretty sure Clint has a better grasp on which way is right, if only because of how he grins when she takes them off in a direction that almost always leads to a dead end and more making out, like he knows it's coming before they even get there. Sometimes they end up in a group--once with a family whose pre-teen twins actually recognize Clint, but who play it so cool that he signs their hoodies while their parents argue about which way to go and never notice--but mostly they're just wandering around more-or-less alone. 

It's fun and all, but Darcy is already ready to go when a girl shrieks in the next aisle over from them and she half-jumps out of her skin. It's not just her, either; Clint's hand goes rock solid against hers. The scream is followed by a rapid apology in a voice that cracks from baritone and then back and some general laughter. Clint relaxes, so Darcy figures no-harm, no-foul and tells her heart to stand down. The light is almost gone from the sky, though, and they're working just by the flat light cast by the giant spotlights up by the crow's nest, and she's pretty happy when they turn the corner and walk into the open square that's center point of the maze. 

She's just turning to Clint to tell him that she's ready for him to take point and get them to the exit when another group of stupid kids comes barreling out into the square fast enough that they crash into Clint from behind and send him and Darcy staggering forward. 

"Oh, hey, man, sorry," the least obnoxious of the kids says as they crash off.

"Yeah, no problem," Clint answers, but his voice is tight and his words come little too slowly. Plus, Darcy had been looking right at him when the collision had happened. Even in the bad light she'd seen how his eyes had gone flat and his mouth tight, and she's pretty sure he's breathing way too evenly not to be consciously keeping it in check. 

"Clint?" she asks quietly. She's okay until he looks at her and there's a split-second where she's not sure he recognizes her. That kinda makes her blood run cold, but then he blinks and she can tell it's her he's seeing. It's not much, but she'll take it. "Are you--?"

"I need to get out of here," Clint answers, his eyes moving in quick flickering patterns all around them. " _Now_."

"I'm totally good with that," Darcy tells him and mentally braces herself to go out through the walls of corn stalks. He just takes her hand again, though, and walks them out in a calm, controlled path, only hesitating at one intersection and that for no more than a second.

Darcy stays with him as they come out of the maze. The open field ahead of them is full of people and noise, but Clint ignores it all, threading them through the crowd and over to the edge by the road. He's still breathing in that super-controlled way, but Darcy thinks his shoulders don't look quite as tense and she doesn't get the feeling he's on quite as much of a hair-trigger.

"Can I help?" Darcy asks. She's actually pretty proud at how steady and not-freaked she sounds. "Or do you just need me to keep quiet? I can actually do that."

She does not throw her arms up and cheer when he gives her a quirky half-smile but she damn well feels like it. 

"Nah, don't strain yourself," Clint says, and again with the wanting to cheer at the almost-normal tease in his voice. The 'almost' part kinda makes her want to cry, though. "A bottle of water probably wouldn't be a bad idea."

"Okay," Darcy says. She waits for a second, but he's still holding her hand, so she adds, "Do you want me to get it or do you want to walk over with me?"

"Sorry," Clint sighs, catching on. It isn't until he drops her hand that Darcy realizes how hard he's been holding onto it, but she just leans up carefully to drop a kiss on his cheek and doesn't shake out her hand until she's turned away and can keep it in front of her where he can't see. She's perfectly fine and doesn't need him to think anything else.

The line at the little shack moves pretty quickly, but Darcy grabs two bottles of water out of the ice herself and tells the girl behind the counter to keep the change just to keep things from stalling out. When she turns around to head back, it's easy to find Clint in the crowd because now that she's looking, she can see how he'd taken them straight to the top of a small rise, because of course he wants the high ground even if it's not all that high. It's not really surprising except for how she hadn't even noticed him assessing the layout, which means he probably does it automatically, which is pretty exhausting to think about. 

It is what it is, though, so Darcy doesn't mention it, just gets her ass back over to her guy and and hands over the first bottle of water. Clint drains it in two long swallows. Darcy can't decide if that's good or not, but when he crumples the bottle and tosses it into a trash can that's a pretty ridiculous distance away from them, ringing it without even a ricochet, she leans toward the Mostly Okay column. She resolves to be chill and laidback, and let him tell her what he needs from her.

"Sorry, darlin'," he sighs. "Some days my brain really doesn't like not being able to see what's coming for me. Didn't mean to ruin the whole night." Darcy manages to bite back the _fuck that shit_ that she wants to say, but honestly cannot stop the rude noise that takes its place, which yeah, so much for chill and laidback. Since she's already ruined that, she goes ahead and tucks herself up under his arm. He lets her move into him easily, so she doesn't guess she's screwed anything up too badly.

"'S okay," she says. "The whole point of this kind of a place is to get lost and make out, which, y'know, we did." She tips her head back and grins at him, and then shares her water with him. He takes it, but doesn't look convinced, so she's not all that surprised when there's more.

"I scared you, though," he finally says, which, yeah, he did, but she feels like there's an important distinction she needs to get out there.

"I was scared _for_ you," Darcy says firmly. "Not of you. Okay?" She waits until he nods, which takes a bit, but less time than she expects. "And I know you're going to side-eye the hell out of this, but I was ready to go before all the excitement, which really wasn't all that eye-popping." She takes the bottle back from him and adds, "Seriously, I thought we were going straight out, whoosh, not just stroll out like you designed the thing."

"Nah." Clint shakes his head. "They had a sketch up behind the guys running the entrance; I got a pretty good look at it while we were waiting to go in."

Darcy thinks hard about that, but no matter how she tries, she doesn't remember anything that could even possibly be what he's talking about. She doesn't doubt what he's saying, and she gets where paying attention to everything is pretty damn important in his day job, but out here in the country with the two-bit semi-attraction? Again with the exhausting. That's probably not an opinion he needs to hear, so she covers by narrowing her eyes and saying, "So we weren't, in fact, actually lost every time I walked us into a dead end? You just let me walk us around in circles…?"

"I thought the point was to make out," Clint says with an almost perfect smirk, stealing the water back from her again. Darcy rolls her eyes even if she isn't exactly feeling it because that's what she's supposed to do, and not for a full ride to grad school is she going to let on that she can see how hard he's trying to make things be normal again.

"Right, so, mission accomplished, go us," Darcy says, playing along with him. He finishes the water and crumples the bottle up, ringing the trash can again. Darcy looks around the field and the crowd and allows her skepticism to edge into her voice. "I'm thinking it's time for something a little less boring than bottled water, though."

"Nothing too exciting," Clint warns with a sort of rueful twist of his lips. "Been there, done that—"

"Don't need another t-shirt," Darcy finishes for him. "Yup, I'm totally with you there. My plan is of the heavy-on-the-chocolate-light-on-the-tequila-all-topped-off-with-baby-animal-adorableness-on-youtube type."

"I—" Clint starts, and then shakes his head, like he's not exactly sure how he's supposed to react to her suggestion. Darcy is inordinately proud that she can still tilt his worldview (not to mention really goddamned happy he's still up for getting it tilted. Most other guys would have bailed long ago.) "Okay."

"Good answer," Darcy says, managing to dredge up a pretty fucking awesome smile if she does say so herself. She gestures wide with one arm and loops the other through his. "Onward."

x - x - x

It's not that easy, of course.

The trip back to her apartment is fine, but once they're up inside, it takes a while before Clint's brain eases off on the hyper-alert throttle and lets him sit down for more than a couple of seconds. On the plus side, Darcy is now completely sure that all of the locks on the windows and doors are in perfect working order and that none of the trees close to the detached garage she lives over are capable of supporting an adult-sized person who might want to use them to climb up and spy on her. It's not a great trade-off--she lives on the corner of what everybody calls Professors' Row, so it's not exactly a high-crime area--but she's trying to put the best spin on it all.

It doesn't help that Darcy is sure that Natasha would know exactly how to help Clint deal, while the best she can come up with is to back off and let him do whatever he needs to do. She _is_ pretty sure that hovering is the absolute worst thing possible, so she makes herself set up shop in the kitchen and gives him the run of everywhere else.

She hadn't quite managed to get much actual food in the place for the weekend, but mostly she'd meant to get healthy stuff like veggies and the staggering amount of protein it takes to maintain muscles like the ones she is becoming very fond of waking up next to. She _always_ has crap around, though, so by the time Clint's sort of wound down and is leaning against the counter that separates her little kitchen area from the rest of the room, Darcy is about to put the finishing touches on her masterpiece (she is totally capable of impartiality here, but there's no need for it) of flour, sugar, butter and eggs. And chocolate

"That is…" Clint shakes his head. "Do I even want to know what that is?"

"It's better than bottled water, is what it is," Darcy tells him as she gets the last of the peanut butter cups chopped up. "This," she says, scooping up all the little bits of Reese's heaven, "is a pancake cake. It is the white trash cousin of a _mille crepe_ , but I didn't think you'd mind not getting the gour-maaaaay version."

She's laying it on a little thick, but if she's judging by Clint's snort, it's mostly working without looking like she's trying too hard.

"In its high-class life, there's generally a stack of crepes and some pastry cream, or maybe some rosewater, but here we've got pancakes--chocolate chip pancakes, mind you--layered with Hershey's syrup and peanut butter, topped with--" Darcy scatters her handful of chopped peanut butter cups with an artful little flip and reaches for the bottle of chocolate syrup--"Reeses and _more_ Hershey's syrup. Like I said: heavy on the chocolate, light on the--"

"Tequila," Clint finishes for her. "I remember." He looks at the plate dubiously, which Darcy magnanimously ignores while covering the top with a nice little lattice pattern of liquid chocolate.

"I'd throw on some whipped cream if I had any, but since this has been a Lewis Improvisational Special, we'll just make do with what we've got." Darcy hands him the plate, her biggest cutting knife (the tower of pancakes, peanut butter and chocolate syrup is _impressively_ high and will defeat an ordinary butter knife, don't ask her how she knows), and two forks, and shoos him out to where she's turned her big monitor around so they can sit on the couch and watch the aforementioned baby-animal-adorableness.

"It's traditional to start with kittens and puppies," Darcy tells him as they get settled with the plate on their lap in the middle. "You have to work up to the otters and hedgehogs."

"You're the expert," Clint tells her easily enough. His eyes are tired and strained, though, and despite the oh-so-casual sprawl he's working, Darcy can feel the tension under the surface, like he's still not sure whether he can relax. She's been with him in the middle of all kinds of crazy shit, she knows that feeling, but nothing really happened tonight and it's still like that. Everything sort of crashes down on her and there's a blinking neon sign at how comically out of her depth she is here, babbling on about idiotic youtube videos to somebody whose brain hasn't really come down from screaming warnings at him non-stop.

"Oh, I--shit," Darcy stutters, pushing the plate away. The thought of all that sugar is suddenly nauseating. She sits up and shakes her head. "It's—I mean, you can tell me if this is too stupid, you know? I'm pretty sure this isn't the first time something like, like that, in the maze, has happened—" She waits until he shrugs, and then finishes, "And you'd know better than me how to deal with it. You don't have to play along with my dumb ideas, okay?"

Clint looks at her for a long few seconds before he sits up straight, too, and makes sure the plate is safe on the crate Darcy uses as a coffee table.

"Who says they're dumb?" he asks, taking one of her hands in his when she rolls her eyes at him. "They're a hell of a lot smarter than taking your best shot at drinking a bar dry. And that's before you add in bail money and tryin' to butterfly where the guy you insulted—and his buddies—took _their_ best shot at kicking your head in." 

Darcy's hand moves without her actually thinking about it, reaching out to touch a small, faded scar on his temple, nothing like the ones she knows came from bullets and knives (and other, much scarier things that she can't think about without wanting to throw up.) Clint's mouth quirks up into a half-smile and he adds, "I kinda feel like I should add that Nat and I took them down, but yeah, still a hell of a lot dumber than being here with you, so, y'know--" He hesitates for a second or two, and when he starts talking again, his voice is lower and rougher. "Thanks for hanging in there with me."

"You're welcome," Darcy manages to whisper. She smooths her thumb along the curve of his cheekbone and he turns his face into her hand. She ends up curled into him, tucked up under one arm with the stupid plate of pancakes back on his lap and her curated, ultimate-in-cuteness playlist on the monitor. Darcy doesn't think he even bothers with the actual silverware she's provided, just digs into her pancake tower with his hands, which, Darcy is willing to concede, is a more than acceptable adjustment, especially when he's feeding her every other bite.

Somewhere in the middle of the hardcore (aka, the koala) section of the playlist, Darcy falls asleep and it's almost dawn when she wakes up again. "Hey, darlin'," Clint murmurs when she shifts around. She cranes her neck and blinks up at him, squinting a little. He looks pretty chill even though she's been sleeping on him for the whole night and, from how stiff she feels, she doesn't think she's moved around much so he probably hasn't either. "You okay?"

"'M good," Darcy says. "You?" She sits up and winces a little as she stretches and reaches for her glasses. "Did you get any sleep?" 

"More than I expected," Clint says, which doesn't exactly answer Darcy's question, but when she gets her glasses on and really gets a good look at him, most of the tension and tightness around his eyes has smoothed out. She decides that's at least marginally acceptable. 

"Yeah? Wanna try for a little more in an actual bed?" It's not what anyone might call an exciting offer, but given the amount of for-real, heart-stopping events in their lives, sometimes excitement is over-rated. From how Clint groans as he hauls himself to his feet, Darcy's not the only one who's thinking that way. 

She gathers up the sticky remains of the pancake plate, but Clint takes them out of her hands and hip-checks her off toward the bathroom when she stares at him in confusion. She goes, finally, but yeah, kinda wants to check for mind control again. He has many sterling qualities, but neatness isn't one of them--she knows he could have stepped over and around the plate for the rest of his visit.

"I'm gonna set the coffee timer for ten, okay?" Clint calls from the kitchen, which (thankfully) explains eeeeeverything. He has Rules-With-A-Capital-R about his coffee and the first one is that it can never be too strong. Darcy is not opposed to people who love their caffeine, but no matter how many scoops of beans she starts with, she can never get it strong enough.

"My hero," Darcy answers, sing-songing around her toothbrush as she scrubs the taste of stale sugar and chocolate out of her mouth. Clint slides into the tiny bathroom behind her, dropping a kiss on the back of her neck right as she's finishing up getting yesterday's make-up off her face. It's not anything outrageous, just a quick brush of his lips across her skin, but it still makes her breath catch. 

That's nothing compared to a few minutes later, though, when he comes back out of the bathroom while she's still fumbling out of her clothes and slides his hands up under her unbuttoned blouse. _That's_ a full-on shiver even before he pushes the sleeves off her shoulders and leaves her standing there in just her bra and jeans.

"Now, this," Clint murmurs, tracing his fingers in a slow path alongside the dark blue satin of her bra, "this did not come from anyplace cheap." 

"It did not," Darcy agrees on a long, slow sigh of pleasure as he smooths his palms down her sides and works her jeans off her hips. She shimmies a little to get the denim all the way down her legs, because as much as she loves wearing ridiculously expensive matching bra and bikini sets for herself, it's definitely a bonus to show them off.

"Look at you, darlin'," Clint breathes, his hands on her hips, fingers tracing little loops on the small of her back. She'd finally convinced him that she didn't mind the rough scrape of the calluses on his fingertips, and she squirms to feel them now, there, knowing it's just a preview of how they'll feel elsewhere. "Never get tired of it."

"You, too," Darcy whispers, her brain working just enough to get her own hands up under his t-shirt. "Want to see you, too."

He has to let go of her to get out of his shirt and jeans, which sucks, but free access to the acres of skin across his shoulders and arms and abs is worth it, especially since he doesn't stay away long, coming back to her so focused and intent that her nipples tighten even before he starts teasing at them, the scrape of his thumbnails muted by the satin of her bra.

"Don't be a jerk," Darcy says, leaning up to kiss him and reaching back to unhook her bra at the same time. 

It probably shouldn't be a surprise that they both have enough residual adrenaline simmering in their systems that everything goes from half-awake to half-crazed in no time, but Darcy's still reeling from how quickly they go from that first kiss to flat-out on the bed, one of her legs up over his shoulder as he pushes into her with quick, shallow thrusts that aren't doing much but shredding any sense of control either one of them had.

"Come on," Darcy gasps, dragging her nails down across his biceps and back up to his shoulders. "Come _on_." She breaks off with a snap of her teeth as he braces himself on one arm and slides the other hand between them, pinching and twisting her nipples right on the edge of too hard, enough that she wants to scream at how good it feels. 

"Good?" Clint grits out. It hadn't taken him long to figure out what she likes, but he always asks, always checks in. 

"Yes," Darcy answers, pulling him closer, grasping at his back, his hips with greedy, shaking hands.

"More?"

" _Yes_." Darcy turns her head so she can bite at his biceps. "Nothing but me and you, Barton, nothing but us."

Something in there--something that she's said or done--works, flips a switch so he's not just teasing them both to insanity, but moving harder and faster, fucking into her like he can't do anything else, can't see anything else, not slowing down even when Darcy comes with a wail that she muffles against his skin.

As good as he makes her feel, as much as she trusts him no matter what they're doing, Darcy still thinks the best part is getting to watch him let go, even if it's only for a few minutes. She likes feeling him lose his rhythm, likes being there when he lets himself stop paying attention to the rest of the world, and really, just fucking _loves_ that she's the one there with him.

x - x - x

"I thought we were here to sleep a little more," Clint says after an hour of lazy kisses and some excellent cuddling. His heart is beating steady and sure under where Darcy is curled into him, her head on his shoulder and her thumb rubbing in a lazy arc over the opposite hip bone.

"This is good," Darcy murmurs. That's the truth--seriously, how could it not be?--but not the whole truth in that she's promised herself not to fall asleep before he does and guess who's still not even close to la-la land? "Yeah?"

"Yeah," Clint agrees. One hand is playing with the ends of her hair, twisting it up in little curls and combing them out again. It's ridiculously soothing, maybe even better than sleep, and Darcy is not saying that lightly, not with her class schedule and everything she has to get done before the new year and the end of the semester. "What do you know about Cap's new team?"

It's not as much of a non sequitur as it sounds; Darcy knows there's Avenger-ing happening even when there aren't aliens or robots or secret Nazi cults in the news. She also knows it takes her own personal Avenger a long time to work up to talking about the important stuff. This is as good a time as any to get into whatever it is.

"Only that it's happening," Darcy answers. "And Thor isn't really committed on account of whatever weird shit is going down in Asgard this week."

Clint nods. "That's about it. New team…"

His voice trails off for long enough that Darcy prompts, "And?"

"And I'm not sure how I fit. Or," he says, clearly feeling his way through his words, "More like, how I want it to fit."

"Oh," Darcy says. "That's kinda big." She's careful to keep herself loose and relaxed, because she does not want to lose this moment on account of poor listening skills. 

"Yeah," Clint agrees. His voice is low. "Big. That's... That's the thing. I don't know if I'm much use with how crazy this is all getting."

Darcy knows what her answer is, but she's pretty sure he knows that already, too, so she goes for the flanking move.

"What does Natasha say?"

Clint snorts. "That it's my turn to try for something that might be a little normal and her turn to hang around and pick up the pieces."

Darcy sorts through the implications of all that. "I'm thinking I probably don't want to know…?"

"It was pretty much a mess, but hey, at least she tried."

"That's important," Darcy says. "Trying, I mean." She's probably too young for that not to sound pretentious, but it's definitely one of the things she's figured out about life. Clint just nods, though, so maybe it'd been a good thing to say.

"So, yeah, I have no idea," Clint says. "About what all that means. At least long-term. Short term, I'm keeping an eye on Wilson's place in DC."

"Okay," Darcy says. She tips her head back so she can look at him. "Like you told me: whatever you need to do, okay?" It's an awkward reach but she cranes her head up so she can kiss him. "And hey, look at us: communicating!"

"Imagine that," Clint says, but his smile isn't at all snarky. Darcy kisses him again and then settles back on his shoulder and lets him go back to playing with her hair.

"Just like people who love each other and want to be together," she says, the words slipping out before she thinks about what she's saying. She freezes for a split second, horrified at her stupid mouth and how it always runs away from her brain, but Clint's hand never so much as hesitates in combing through her hair.

"Just like," he agrees, his voice as warm and content as Darcy feels.

**Author's Note:**

> Done, done, done, \o/ \o/ \o/ !!!!!!
> 
> Thank you, thank you, and thank you again for staying with me for so long! I started this sometime in 2013 and fully intended it to be my 2014 Marvel Bang, which obviously did not happen, but I thought for sure I could get it done before AoU. Hah, yeah, not so much. 
> 
> But I feel like this is where I wanted them to be and hopefully was not just a retread of Rolling Stone and I am so pleased that I got here FINALLY. (Did I mention the \o/ ? 'Cause, yeah, picture me dancing around the house still in my pajamas at 7 p.m. because I started in on this again this morning and realized I really *could* see the end in sight. My kids ate Girl Scout cookies and potato chips for lunch and dinner, but wheeeee, donedoneDONE.)
> 
> Title from _When We Fall In_ , by Sean Hayes.
> 
> I'm also on [tumblr](http://topaz119.tumblr.com/), where I spend my days indulging the Jeremy Renner thing I can't quite seem to break free of (there's other stuff, too, but JR is definitely my weak spot.) 
> 
> The tag I'm using to keep track of the lovely photos/fanart/.gifs that remind me of this story (including the inspiration for Darcy's kitchen antics) is [here](http://topaz119.tumblr.com/tagged/mbb2).


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